Anita Brookner by Hermione Lee review – an enigmatic literary great given her due

‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” The first fictional sentence Anita Brookner ever published, aged 53, in A Start in Life, certainly set a tone. If people have heard of Brookner today, Hermione Lee says, they imagine a lonely, cardiganed woman yearning for an absent lover. “This,” says Lee (an emeritus English professor at the University of Oxford), “won’t do.” The cardiganed image confuses the author with her protagonists. Of 24 novels written across 30 years, only the first four – A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac – are about a single woman pining for love. There is certainly a “Brooknerian” style, characterised by elegance, restraint and melancholia, but her fiction engaged with our emotional lives broadly, examining family, exile, home, trauma, ageing and much more. Born in 1928 and raised in south London by a fearsome Polish-Jewish grandmother and absurdly ineffectual parents (a tobacco salesman and a failed singer), Brookner was a highly academic only child. After a degree at King’s College London, she briefly tasted freedom as a student in Paris, but was soon dragged back to care for her extraordinarily needy mother. Yoked to home for the next decade, she managed, nevertheless, to become a brilliant art critic and a charismatic lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, where she stayed until retirement. In the introduction, Lee describes hearing the author’s voice saying, repeatedly, “Go away”, and Brookner’s 20s and 30s were the “most hidden, the least witnessed” of all. Brookner did her utmost to erase her life, and Lee is forced, therefore, to mine any detail she can find. As well as Brookner’s academic work and extensive reading habits, we get her poor handwriting, fear of trains, love of perfumes and at one particularly desperate point, salary increases over two decades. A couple of love affairs in her 30s fizzled out, but if there was ever a record of her feelings, Brookner expunged it. The fi…