Remembering Anita Brookner: Hermione Lee on the Writer Behind Hotel du Lac

On the tenth anniversary of Brookner’s death, Hermione Lee reflects on the novelist’s mystery, wit, and emotional courage—ahead of her forthcoming biography from Chatto & Windus.

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Ten years ago, on 10 March 2016, the novelist Anita Brookner died. This year, my biography of her will be published by Chatto & Windus. It has been a challenging and absorbing task.

Brookner was an intensely private person who made away with most of her archive, kept her friends in separate compartments, and had secrets she never revealed. She was legendary for her perfect manners, impeccable looks, and self-protective habits. She had an aura of mystery and reserve. At the same time she was a person of great passion, intelligence, wit, style and humanity, deeply loved by her friends and with a devoted following of readers.

Born in south London in 1928, she came from a family of middle-class, Polish-Jewish immigrants, with anxious, unhappy parents. Until her late thirties, Brookner nursed her invalid mother until she died, 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 for Art History, teaching and writing on 18^th and 19^th century French art and literature, and influencing generations of students. In her fifties she began to write fiction: it was a new 'start in life'. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac; and after that she wrote roughly a novel a year until her eighties.

Brookner was a remarkable woman who I think has been misrepresented as a depressing novelist of sad lonely women. She is much tougher, funnier and bolder than that. Though she was not a feminist, it’s one of Brookner’s contradictions that she wrote with depth, brilliance, and tenderness about women’s lives, their challenges, sorrows and endurance. I admire her as a fine, gallant, courageous person and an incomparably stylish and moving writer. She deserves to be celebrated, remembered, and adopted by new generations of readers.

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