Anita Brookner

Art and Life

By: Hermione Lee

One of our most brilliant biographers illuminates the life and work of one of the most fascinating, iconic English novelists of our time.

“Hermione Lee is a literary life-writer par excellence.” —The Atlantic


Anita Brookner is famous for her quiet, incisive studies of solitary and emotionally restrained characters—often middle-class women—navigating loneliness, disappointment, and small eruptions of desire beneath a façade of reserve. She is so closely associated with these protagonists, in fact, that say the name "Anita Brookner" and most people come up with the image of a woman in a long gray cardigan, gazing out the window of a bleak London flat or onto the misty waters of a Swiss lake, wistfully yearning for an absent or unreliable lover. Yet as master biographer Hermione Lee demonstrates in her captivating, immersive biography, Brookner the writer was the inventor of those lonely women, not their alter-ego.

Brookner herself was formidable, witty, elegant, precise, and always ruthlessly in charge, and her life was full of contradictions. She was first and foremost an accomplished art historian, and the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge; her debut novel, ironically titled A Start in Life, was published at the age of fifty-three. A Booker Prize followed shortly thereafter for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, beating out works by J.G. Ballard and Julian Barnes, and with that, Brookner's reputation as a premier novelist was cemented. She left behind twenty-five novels, several volumes of art history, and a wealth of criticism, yet very few personal papers, seemingly determined to preserve her private, enigmatic personal legacy.

In Hermione Lee’s hands, Brookner has met her biographical match. This luminous, absorbing portrait seamlessly weaves life and work into a vivid, insightful, and riveting portrait that sheds brilliant light on a novelist—and woman—like no other.