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Anita Brookner

Many writers in Britain have been made to feel uncomfortable with their Jewishness, so it is hardly surprising to find that Brookner rarely wrote overtly about Jews. Yet her characters are often refugees who inhabit the outsider’s world of St Johns Wood. They may even have arrived as children on a train from Germany during the war (Latecomers). In Brookner’s first novel, A Start in Life (1981), Ruth Weiss’s grandmother has “a sad European past,” is surrounded by the dark, heavy pieces of furniture brought from Berlin and enjoys, as a source of warmth and security, the food she knew back home—buttermilk, rye bread, caraway seeds, cucumbers. John Skinner has highlighted Brookner’s concern with food, seeing the shared meal as a form of communion (The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance, 1992). A Jewish critic would have no difficulty in also perceiving the significance of food as the primary achievement of the nurturing Jewish mother. The Jewish father’s duty, on the other hand, is to provide spiritual sustenance (in Brookner’s no

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Novelist and art historian Anita Brookner was born in Herne Hill, a suburb of London, England, on July 16, 1928. Her father, Newson Bruckner, was a Polish immigrant, and her mother, Maude Schiska, was a singer whose father had immigrated from Poland and founded a tobacco factory. Maude changed their surname to Brookner due to anti-German sentiment in England. Anita Brookner had a lonely childhood, although her grandmother and uncle lived with the family, and her parents, nonreligious Jews, opened their house to Jewish refugees during the 1930s and World War II. Brookner, an only child, never married and took care of her parents as they aged. Her personal history influenced her first novel, A Start in Life, which she published in 1981 at the age of fifty-three. She continued to write, producing a novel every year or so. Her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac (1984), won the Booker Prize for Fiction and was adapted for television in 1986. Brookner is highly regarded as a stylist, and her novels typically depict intellectual, middle-aged women who suffer emotional loss and isolation, esp

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Chatto signs Lee's biography of Anita Brookner

Chatto & Windus has signed a new biography by Hermione Lee of art historian and Booker-winning novelist Anita Brookner.

Clara Farmer, publishing director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Caroline Dawnay at United Agents. LuAnn Walther has acquired North American English-language rights for the Knopf list at Penguin Random House US.

The synopsis explains: “Anita Brookner (1928–2016) is a seductive subject for a literary biography. She was a writer like no other, of stylish brilliance, wisdom, passion, sadness and irony, and she was a magnetic, witty and complex woman, at once well-known and private, candid and secretive, loved by many and close to very few. Her personal style, more French than English, was impeccably self-concealing; her attitude to life was both romantic and grimly realistic.”

Lee, who has previously written on Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald, has been given the full co-operation of Brookner's estate for her new work. She interviewed and of