# Anita Brookner

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- Book: [Anita Brookner](https://www.bookquiver.com/hermione-lee/anita-brookner) ([Anita Brookner.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/hermione-lee/anita-brookner.md))
- Authors: [Hermione Lee](https://www.bookquiver.com/hermione-lee)
- Publisher: Chatto & Windus
- ISBN: 978-17-8474-468-7
- Pages: 544
- Published: 2026-09-10
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Hardcover

## Description

It would be hard to think of a better biographer for this uniquely contradictory intellectual…. piercingly intelligent… Lee’s biography … has joie de vivre , high humour and energetic compassion for the multiplying complexities of the human mind' The Observer ' A gripping and illuminating portrait of a life dedicated to its art' Financial Times '[A] thoroughly absorbing and beguiling biography' Spectator 'One emerges from Lee’s biography deeply moved' Sunday Times The groundbreaking biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers. Hermione Lee reveals the full story of a brilliant, idiosyncratic and complex woman and goes deep into Anita Brookner’s marvellous work in all its stylishness and daring. Born in south London in 1928, Brookner came from a family of middle-class, Polish-Jewish immigrants. Her parents were anxious and unhappy. Until she was well into her thirties, she nursed her invalid mother with a painful mixture of love and resentment. She would have liked a marriage and children; instead, she lived alone and became a great writer of solitude, self-knowledge and survival. For many years she worked at the Courtauld Institute, teaching French Romanticism in art, and influencing generations of students. In her fifties she began to write fiction: her first novel was the wryly titled A Start in Life . In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac ; after that, a novel appeared almost every year until her eighties. In her lifetime Brookner was seen as an object of wonder and fascination. She was a formidable and inspiring teacher, an enormously knowledgeable, witty and perceptive art historian and critic, and a novelist like no other. Her extraordinary fictions of heroic solitude, romantic passion, longing and lethal social comedy, written with elegance and impeccable control, gained her a devoted following. But she also attracted hostility and bafflement, often from readers challenged by the unsentimental realism of her fierce, strange and moving books.