I'm writing my PhD on contemporary British novelist and

French Romantic art historian Anita Brookner, best

known for writing boring books about lonely, single
women. My PhD re-assembles this description in ways
that make her look good. I will submit in 2010.

80-word PhD
Anita Brookner is a contemporary British novelist and French
Romantic art historian known to write boring books about lonely,
single women. I argue that Brookners reception or first reading
is a misreading effected by the way in which contemporaneity
and heterosexuality are produced in the literary marketplace.
Inspired by an array of nineteenth-century intertextual
references in the Brookner novel, I draw on French aestheticism
to produce a new epistemology of the Brookner text. I stage a
cast of Romantic Personae including the Military Man, the
Aesthete, the Dandy and the Flaneur as narrative devices
which provide an alternative methodology for reading
Brookner. The result is a new mode of literary criticism
called performative romanticism. The outcome is a
queering of the Brookner text.

Anita Brookner - her life and work

This is the working draft of my entry on AB "her life and work" for
The Literary Encyclopedia
Anita Brookner is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art
historian and a contemporary British novelist. Brookner was born on
July 16, 1928, in Herne Hill, South London. The only child of Maude
and Newson Bruckner, the novelists family were Polish Jews.
Brookners father left Poland when he was sixteen and fought for
the British in World War I; Brookners mother, a professional
mezzo-soprano before her marriage, was born in London. The
Brookner household comprised an extended family whom
Brookner described as being of such surpassing eccentricity
that with the passing of the years I honestly think most of
them were mad (Barber, March, 1983, p.26).

The family ran a tobacco-importing business, an interesting fact

given that the last known image of the novelist published to
accompany a Daily Telegraph interview in 2009 shows her smoking
a cigarette. In the same interview, a former student of
Brookners from the 1960s recalls how Brookner smoked
throughout tutorials and encouraged students to smoke as
well. In addition to its Freudian connotations, the image reflects
Brookners quiet subversion, both anachronistic and erotic.
Anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe impacted the family in a number
of ways. Cosmetically, it informed the change of name from
Bruckner to Brookner as well as Newsom Brookners decision to give
his daughter the novels of Dickens to read. My Polish father, who
remained very Polish, thought that the best thing he could do for
me was to unveil the mysteries of English life which could be found
in the novels of Charles Dickens: he really believed that. So I was
set to read Dickens at the age of seven, and I read all the novels,
she explained (Haffenden, 1985, p.68). Both creatively and morally,
this was to have an enormous effect on Brookner. Fragile health
prevented her learning Hebrew and the family shifted to central
London in search of a better environment. She attended the James
Allens School for Girls, Dulwich, and on weekends would escape to
the Dulwich Picture Gallery where she received an early initiation in
the power of images. Brookner is an atheist, although she once
remarked that You can never betray the people who are
dead, so you go on being a public Jew; the dead cant answer
slurs, but Im here. I would love to think that Jesus wants
me for a sunbeam, but he doesnt (Haffenden, 1985, p.67).
Brookner proceeded to Kings College, University of London where
she studied history and French literature, before taking up art
history at the Courtauld Institute of Art because she hated history
without the pictures (McGregor, 1982). In 1950, she won a French
government scholarship to write her dissertation on the French
painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) at the cole du Louvre,
Paris.
Brookners parents objected to her move abroad and refused to
support her financially. She supplemented her small stipend by
writing articles (like one of her famous subjects, Charles Baudelaire
(1821-67), whose portrait by douard Manet (1832-83) hangs in
her Chelsea flat) for the Burlington Magazine and the Times Literary
Supplement, commenting that I was liberated by poverty
before I knew what the womens movement was all about
(Hale, June 1985, p.37).

She has frequently described this period as the happiest of

her life.
A prodigious critical career was set in motion, which has
spanned over sixty years and established Brookner as an
international authority in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury French art criticism. The Romantic period, she says,
is of great interest to me, because its to do with modes of
behaviour, as much as ways of doing things
After three years in Paris, Brookner reluctantly returned to
London to care for sick parents. She first taught art history at
Reading University. In 1967, she was appointed the first
female Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge and was a lecturer
and then Reader at the Courtauld from 1964 to 1988. Her success
as a French Romantic art historian is often disguised by a modest
and ironic personal narrative, yet Brookner was considered a
pioneer in New Art Criticism and published a number of critical texts
including a celebrated monograph on Jacques Louis David, The
Genius of the Future: Studies in French Art Criticism and
Romanticism and its Discontents. Much of Brookners criticism
concerns writers and artists who also made significant contributions
to the emerging queer canon, such as Charles Baudelaire , JorisKarl Huysmans (1848-1907) and Henry James (1843-1916).
Brookner was considered a popular star turn at the
Courtauld. Former student and one-time director of the National
Gallery, Neil McGregor, recalled that She insisted that art
historians must have the courage of their feelings as well as
their convictions (Guppy, July 1998, p.285). Brookner
expressed surprise at the degree to which she enjoyed
teaching: Im such a nervous person I wouldnt have
thought Id be good at it. But the students are so amiable.
They havent yet learned those little hypocrisies. And if they
trust you, then you must give them your full attention (Hale,
June 1985, p.37). In 2009, reflecting on her career as a
novelist, she said My real work was as a teacher and an
academic, and I loved it. This is really just filling the time
(Brown, 20 Feb 2009).
At the age of fifty-one, Brookner published her first novel, A
Start in Life (1980), which shares its title with a 1844 novelette
by Honor de Balzac (1799-1850), Un Debut dans la vie, and in
which the main protagonist, Dr Ruth Weiss, is a Balzac literary
critic. Brookner gave intense boredom as the driving force
behind her decision to write this novel (Hale. June 1985. p.38).
Since I have nothing better to do, let me see if I can work it out,

she told herself. Only as an experiment, of course; I have never

written fiction before in my life, although I have always wanted to
do so (Brookner, August 1981, p.6). Three publishers rejected the
novel before it was picked up by Liz Calder at Jonathan Cape; later,
Brookner became a bestseller for Penguin. In 1984, she won the
Booker Prize for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac. Immediately
following the ceremony it was reported as somewhat curious that
the Chairman of Judges, historian Richard Cobb, praised the novel
as almost eighteenth-century (Mayne, 18 October 1984).
Meanwhile, journalist Richard Mayne contributed by asking Brookner
to comment on her similarities with her main protagonist Edith
Hope: shes obviously very beautiful. These are characteristics
which you share with her. Do you share any others? (Mayne, 18
October 1984). In 1987, Brookner expanded discussion of the novel
by commenting that Edith Hope is not a twentieth-century
heroine, she belongs to the nineteenth century. (Guppy, Fall
1987, p.161). Similarly, she represented her fifth novel, Family
and Friends (1985), as a story about a nineteenth-century
family without a nineteenth century to support it. (Lee, 4
September 1985). These comments are indicative of the way in
which both nineteenth-century and twentieth-century narratives
inhabit Brookners contemporary fiction. As a result, the texts
exhibit a type of chronotopic disjunctiveness which has
commonly been associated with more obviously experimental
writers such as Jeanette Winterson and John Fowles.
Brookners novels generally depict a solitary, intelligent and
elegant heroine, ironic and privileged, who attempts to
reconcile her experience of the world with her expectations.
A small number of her novels feature male protagonists, although
gender indicators do not substantially alter character or plot in
Brookners fiction. The Brooknerine (male or female) often
displays forms of ennui, a broad capacity for self-reflection
and, as walking-protagonists, they inevitably guide readers
through the streets of inner-city London. The novels are set
primarily in contemporary Britain, although trips to the continent
are often imagined if not actualised. At times, the Brooknerines
knowledge of nineteenth-century art and literature informs a
misreading of context, but also underwrites a complex narrative
voice. Significantly, references to nineteenth-century textual and
aesthetic production produce a nineteenth-century effect in
Brookners fiction and denote an archive of intertextual source
material in the Brookner text. In A Misalliance (1986), the
Jamesian Blanche Vernons obsession with the nymphs of
Renaissance painting is transferred to life when she meets
nymphet Sally Beamish, a woman with a legendary
knowledge of love and pleasure. In A Friend from England

(1987), Stendhalian Rachel Kennedy expends considerable energy

trying to influence Heather Livingstone, while her failure to do so
enables a Venetian adventure which elicits amorous revelations in
front of Giorgiones The Tempest. Brief Lives (1990) alludes to the
Brief Lives of seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey
(1626-97), who shares a love of the inconsequential with Brookners
narrator, Fay Dodworth. In Falling Slowly (1998), Beatrices deathly
premonition is precipitated by a painting by William Turner (17891851) at the Tate Gallery. In Undue Influence (1999), Claire Pitts
fabulous imagination inclines toward multiple forms of selfdeception, a tendency which is morally abrogated when read as an
instance of the Baudelairean imagination. The novels all engage
in some way with the genre of domestic fiction. However,
when Nigel Ford put it to Brookner that love and marriage is
also one of your big themes, she replied in a certain
parodied sense. (Ford, May, 1990).
Brookners early reception (or first reading) was produced in an
ideological context organised around feminism, postmodernism,
historicism and the provisions of the literary marketplace. Popular
success notwithstanding, Brookner received widespread
criticism for being boring, plotless, anachronistic, repetitive
and unoriginal. Reviewing her ninth novel, Lewis Percy (1989),
Peter Kemp stereotyped Brookner as the novelist of migraines,
flushes and female malaises (Kemp, 27 August, 1989). At the
same time, some feminists took umbrage at Brookners
representation of women, asking How can this still be the way of
the world at the end of the twentieth century? (Steiner, 23 January
2000, p.34). Brookners art history retrospectively came under
attack, with one critic declaring that it propagated a wilful lack of
context (Higonnet, 3 November 2000, p.16). The critical consensus
was that Brookner was a spinster novelist who was out of
touch with time and place. Reviews presented her as a figure of
popular ridicule and she received little academic attention. As a
result, the first reading of Brookner constituted a wholesale
devaluation of her oeuvre. She stopped giving interviews,
saying they always get it wrong (Guppy, July 1998, p.282).
Brookner was awarded a CBE in 1990 in the company of A.S. Byatt,
but where Byatt was elevated to a DBE in 1999 Brookner has not
been similarly honoured.
Ostensibly because both the novelist and her heroines are
unmarried, childless and outdated, it became standard
practice to read the Brookner text as autobiographical
fiction. The bad reviews were partly a dislike of Blanche,
and of me since Im supposed to be all these women I
create, Brookner noted after the publication of A Misalliance.

(Guppy, Fall 1987, p.166). Autobiographical criticism continued to

foster Brookners devaluation, inspiring such insights as [Brookner]
is autobiographical sometimes to excess and even uses red hair
like her own in almost every book (Sadler, 1990, p.ix). Despite
the temporal complexity and narrational subtleties of Brookners
fiction, generic biographical criticism has tended to foreclose
awareness of Brookners ironic problematization of subjectivity,
and especially of gender identity, as when Williams-Wanquet
observes that: The social and historical forces that have
fashioned the protagonists constantly correspond to the
authors own spatial and temporal setting All that serves to
set the protagonist realistically in time and space
corresponds [sic] to the historical, social and family
background to Brookners own life (Williams-Wanquet, 2004,
p.29). Such presuppositions about the relation between the authors
life and art have obscured other possibilities of theorisation, in
particular in relation to the discourses associated with Decadent and
Aestheticist subjects in Brookners nineteenth-century art criticism
where the privileging of art over life challenged the way in which
conventional narratives were deployed to naturalise categories of
gender, sexuality, history and representation. In the nineteenth
century it seemed more powerful and valid to dissolve order,
Brookner said. (Haffenden, 1985, p.64).

Adaptations: Kristen Scott Thomas as Miriam and

Sherilyn Fenn as Beatrice in Falling Slowly
(1998)
Hotel du Lac I meant as a love story pure and simple: love
triumphed over temptation. The ideal of love. Basically i don't
like adversarial positions. I see no need for them, since life is too
complicated and it's rarely just.

On solitude and the autobiographical

In a 1989 interview, Gail Caldwell raises the issue of the
autobiographical presumption that has contributed to Brookner's
misreading. She comments that "the uneventful life", a
euphemism for the unmarried and the childless, "coupled
with the intense intimacy of her novels has led more than
one reviewer to speculate that Brookner's fiction is drawn
from the well of autobiography". (Here it sounds like Caldwell's
alluding to Raddclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness"). She quotes
AB as saying that the parallels are:

a load of nonsense. Because solitude is very enriching.

Solitude isn't loneliness; that's a very crude mistake. And it's
quite an insulting one, too. It's used as a criticism, you see:
'Oh, this poor thing, forced to live in her imagination.' I find
this unacceptable.
It wouldn't work if it were autobiographical. It couldn't be shaped.
It's some kind of subterranean performance; i don't know what it is.
But it's not something I'm burning to get off my chest - certainly
not!

Self-analysis as an art form.

Asked why she started writing fiction, Brookner replied,
"Boredom".
She continued:
and the wish to review my life, which seemed to be drifting
in predictable channels. I saw it as a little exercise in selfanalysis. What is interesting about self-analysis is that it
leads nowhere. It is an art form in itself.

23/7: AB on the art of fiction

Brookner is known for her technical skill but you don't see her
resourced as a go-to expert on the art of novel writing.
Nevertheless, she makes a few interesting comments on the topic.
In 1985 Hermione Lee asked her about her fifth novel Family and
Friends (1985)
HL: Why is it written in the present tense?
AB: Ah that's tiresome isn't it.
HL: No it's not.
AB: Ah but the fact is, a book writes itself much more quickly if
you use the present tense. You don't have to throw it into
the past, it's as if the voices are in your ear. You immerse
yourself more with your characters and you feed yourself
into their lives. I found it easier, instinctively i found it
easier. I can't justify it in any othe way. Writing a book in the
past tense is a very formal exercise and you sit down and
you think I'm going to tell a story and it happened like this
and there's quite a burden laid on you to do it that way, if you do it
that way. Writing it in the present tense is marvelous it's like
going for a walk with all these people hearing all these
voices, you're contemporary with them.

22 July: The thing is to not be too frightened

Asked to comment re how her books differ from traditional
romances, AB replies:
The interesting thing is that women still want to read these
romances. i think they read them for consolation. They want
to know that it can work out in the end, and it can come out
right. My books differ in the sense that they're more
realistic- things don't work out. They're more fragmented.
There is no safe conclusion. They've been called very
depressing. But anyone who has had unhappy experiences
won't find them depressing. It's very unrealistic to find them
depressing. Life is depressing if you're too frightened of it.
The thing is to not be too frightened.

14/7: Strong Brooknerines

"I think the women in the book are strong", Brookner told
Sue McGregor, in reference to A Start in Life (1980). Spoken
about her first novel, it's interesting to wonder what would
have happened if this sentiment had become the dominant
narrative about the Brooknerine. We'd have to have been living
in a different world.
I think Brooknerines are strong too. They are outsiders, yet
they persist and they are much more emotionally honest
than most people.
"I think I've been very brave", AB also said about herself (to
Michael Barber). I think she's talking about the life she's
made for herself, for the most part referencing the truths
that she's exposed in her writing.

12/7: ???
"The worst thing in life is not knowing what is going on".
AB to Caroline Moorehead, The Times Monday March 21, 1983.
I frequently experience this with my thesis.

8/7: Late fruits and flowers

"I think repression has its uses. Repression sometimes leads
to a very fruitful late flowering when you realize you can

break the rules at last."

7/7: Making Munitions

Brookner's interview with Robert McCrum in The Observer January
2001, called "Just don't mention Jane Austen", is one of my
favourites because it's hilarious. She is really sarcastic in it and
appears to be very resistant to the interview. Or maybe she
wasn't feeling well, in which case that's not so good.
There's so many good moments in it that i'm not sure which to
pluck out.
McCrum starts off by talking about The Bay of Angels, which
incidentally received a lot of attention for the absence of historical
context and I'm pretty sure it was shortlisted for some prizes (she
says convincingly). McCrum asks AB if there was a particular
moment of inspiration for The Bay of Angels.
AB: Well, the curious thing is that i didn't intend to write it. I didn't
know I was going to write it, so it came upon me quite suddenly
and quite easily and I enjoyed writing it. I'm sorry if it's bleak. I'm
sorry if it's mournful. I had a good time, that's all i can say about it.
Here she's saying: get fucked... and again later, when McCrum says
"You've been very successful for a late starter", AB replies:
I wouldn't say that. I'm not very popular, because they're bleak and
they're mournful and all the rest of it and I get censorious reviews.
But I'm only writing fiction. I'm not making munitions, so I think it's
acceptable.

4/7: Other faces of AB

I love Brookner's interviews because she says such smart
and funny things. But my obsession with the interviews is
primarily based on the fact that it's often the least interesting or
contentious things that have been pasted together to produce the
dominant narrative about the author. My July series of AB quotes
will be a way to address this imbalance.
SMG: Youve got a good memory?
AB: Superb.
SMG: Total recollection?
AB: Extraordinary recollection, its more or less unconscious.
SMG: Presumably also for conversations?

AB: Yes I think so.

(From Sue McGregor's interview with Anita Brookner (unpublished)
Womans Hour, B.B.C. Radio Four (London: National Sound Archive,
13 January 1982))
A dominant narrative about AB concerns her low selfesteem. Check this gem:
Anita Brookner is an eminently successful woman In spite
of such achievements the dominant note in her life is the
sense of personal inadequacy a quality she projects into
her heroines lives.
Thanks for that insightful piece of literary criticism, Marilyn
Demerest Button.
In what constitutes a prohibition on honesty, idiots and other highly
educated people seem to confuse self-examination and selfanalysis, even modesty, with low self worth. I like the above
excerpt from an early AB interview, along with countless other
examples, in which she's not as modest as she's frequently
portrayed to be.

My favourite Brookner's
By popular demand, i present a list of Brookner's 24 novels in order
of my favourite.
1. A Misalliance (1986). Hilarious. I love Blanche. There are nymphs
and there is wine. "But art is about aristocracy and subversion, a
deeper subversion than this."
2. Undue Influence (1999). Busy. Contemporary. Claire is also quite
funny - I go to say hysterical but then I change my mind. Lives in
her head; the classic misreader. "It was not the first time I had
been guilty of a misapprehension". Good walking AB.
3. Falling Slowly (1998). Tragic. Extremely sad. Very beautiful
and very funny. Perfect really. Perhaps this would be #1 if i
was more objective, less sentimental. Maybe it makes the best
gift... bundled with Soundings. (How's that for commodification?)
"This was somehow a day on which concentration would not
be possible, a day on which words must give way to
images... She could not now decide whether a library, any
library, was a way out or a way in, a way out of daily life
which contained too much confusion and weariness, or a way

in to silent communion with true achievement, discarnate,

incorporeal, couched in beautiful characters on paper, that
smelt finer to her than the most recondite scents... Love was
to have been the answer..." <-- And all this just in the first
chapter.
4. Visitors (1997). Also hilarious. Dorothea is a cracker. Great minor
characters and analysis of youth - something AB excels at. There is
gay Steve.
5. Brief Lives (1990). Very smart. Julia is excellent, or should i say,
striking and iconic. "Plenty of calories in whiskey".
6. A Friend from England (1987). Quite bizarre. Great motifs and
intertextuality. Dedicated to Melbourne's own Carmen Callil (born
the day before AB). "It was the anger that saved me. I
nurtured it as if it were a sacred flame, a talisman that would
protect me throughout this journey into the unknown.
Without it I would have felt enormously at risk; with it i felt
cold, hard, a bully, a brute. With it I could commit murder.
And while my victim, in all innocence, sat at a table in some
dingy apartment, waiting for her prospective mother-in-law
to serve her with a plate of soup, I armed myself with
courage, sought out my finest clothes, smoothed the leather
of my conqueror's boots against the calves of my legs,
slammed the door of my flat, as if the place were of no
consequence to me, and walked out into the street, the
dearest place on earth to me at that moment, my face
haughty with disapproval". Hello!! What is going on here?!
7. Latecomers (1988). Close to my heart for family reasons but i
like the 2 families she establishes. Smart, neat, simple, deep.
8. Fraud (1992). Also hilarious. "Don't let the cat out!"
9. Hotel du Lac (1984). The classic. Very smart and funny. "From
the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey".
10. A Private View (1994). Because it's Clara's favourite; i'm not
really sure why. Also great on the youth character, Katy, or what
acts as the figure of the contemporary.
11. The Next Big Thing (2002). I like Julius. "This was a day in
which nothing was supposed to happen".
12. Providence (1982). The youthful favourite. Nice representations
of the academy.

13. Family and Friends (1985). Pathos.

14. Leaving Home (2005). Something about the Phd on garden
design gets me in.
15. A Start in Life (1980). For Ruth.
16. Altered States (1996). Good title.
17. Look at Me (1983). It's difficult. The medical library
context.
18. The Bay of Angels (2000). Very intelligent, almost tricky.
19. A Closed Eye (1991). Sad. Epigraph / title = homage to James.
20. Incidents at the rue Laugier (1995). I like the narrative voice.
21. Lewis Percy (1989). Something about brie?
22. The Rules of Engagement (2003). Why *do* the characters
have the same name? I should revisit this one re female
friendships. "An underfictionalised topic" as AB puts it.
23. Strangers (2009). I've only read it once.
24. A Family Romance (1993). Good on feminism.
There you go. This confirms what i suspected: "the middle
period" gets my "box set" vote - the late 90s was peak AB.

Questions for Brookner

It's funny how often Brookner is accused of repetition.
Most of Brookner's interviews hail from the 80s (the 1980s) so
questions differ from those of contemporary brunch media, which
might interrogate last night's menu. I, for one, would really like to
know what she ate for dinner last night, or every night last week.
Documentation so far consists of yogurt and fruit (spotted by a
stalker at Sainsburys) and "a small jar of Marmite and
slimming biscuits" (Limits?) as reported by a former student of
Brookner's from the Courtauld, Dr ? in Mick Brown's relatively great
interview of 2009. Tangentially, I recall an interview where Carmen
Cahlil mentions that AB would book a great local French restaurant,
and always pick up the bill. What about favourite TV shows?

Magazines? Is it true she doesn't have a computer? An email

account?
For now i'd like to ask her to comment on the relationship
between "the outsider" (or the exile, a term with which she
seems allied) and "the family". Brooknerines are outsiders
with enmeshed relationships to the family. I'd like AB to
comment on ways in which she understands the connection
between the family and the outsider, and how she reads this in a
broader context of aesthetic production, Romanticism and the avant
garde.

My Project - Recent Articulations

Anita Brookner is a French Romantic art historian and a
contemporary British novelist. In popular and critical worlds,
Brookner has been stereotyped as boring, old-fashioned and
unsexy. These criticisms allude to what i call the
"nineteenth-century effect" of her fiction. My contention is that
the interpretation of the cultural text of Anita Brookner hangs on
the reading of the nineteenth-century effect.
The heterochronic organisation of the oedipal narrative
constructing the author-subject means that readings of the
nineteenth-century effect as a signifier of Brookners
personal and sexual failure have dominated criticism of
Brookners novels. The production of the nineteenth-century
effect reflects the simultaneous regulation of
representational status (discursivity, intelligibility, aesthetic
production) and historical status with the figuration of
desire.
I take my methodological impetus from the queering of the
nineteenth century and queer theories of performativity and
crossing.
Read Brookner's reviews in The Spectator
There's something about the reviews AB writes - her ability to see
through convention and delusion, combined with the way she crafts
her observations - that makes them seem even more creative than
her fiction. This might be because the length of the novels, the way
in which they exemplify literary realism, and most of all their hidden
subtexts, make them seem more significant as critical objects as
opposed to merely just pleasurable reading. Generally Brookner's
reviews are much more interesting that the text she's
reviewing.

The Spectator seem to allow you read her current reviews here.
Represented as one of Brookners most painful novels
(Fisher-Wirth), A Friend from England was not a popular
success. Criticisms ranged from a widespread dislike of the
monstrous, pathological character of Rachel, to the
suggestion of a structural fault in Brookners narrative and
reflect the way in which Brookner transgresses normative
expectations. In the Times Literary Supplement David Plante
remarked on a deep sense of unreality pervading the
narrative: When one reads of Heather tucking a rug around
Rachels legs in the car, one wonders if a young woman of
twenty-seven would do that for another young woman,
hardly older, even in England. Plantes comment demonstrates
how age is used as a discursive vehicle for the regulation of gender
normativity in Brookner criticism. At the same time, his response
inversely represents the two main female protagonists in a lesbian
scene.

Familiars - New!
Corny header, I know, but it's kind of true. It's confronting reading
Brookner, mostly because I relate to her characters so strongly.
There's a new lightness about Strangers. I feel like it barely
draws any attention to itself as a representational medium.
There's more dialogue than usual too.
The first thing that struck me was her Author's Note - i think
her first. Then the epigraph by Freud. And the Brookner
repetition.
One favourite line so far: "He was depressed by the state of the
weather, as all those who had little contact with nature (now
known as the environment, he reminded himself)..." (pg 51).
There are flashes of A Misalliance. A Misalliance cracks me up
though, i think it's so funny. Blanche is to die for; I love that line
about her drinking when she says something like "you won't see my
winding around a lamp-post with a riotous hat over one eye"
(totally paraphrasing there).
Anyway, I digress. Strangers made me think all the Romantics
had contentious relationships with their mothers ie that's
what Romantic longing is - in a Freudian (possibly reductive)
context anyway. I recall Brookner writing about this mother - son
dynamic with the Family Baudelaire. Funny, those words don't seem

to go together.
Paul Sturgis of Strangers is a reader protagonist. I remember one
funny review of Brookner which asked, why don't Brooknerines read
Brookner? (ie the authentic, fictional Brooknerines, not us wannabe
Brooknerines). Oo the Wannabe Brooknerine. A paradox... Unless,
ugh, Emo?
He would go to the London Library, seek consolation among
the stacks, take out books that he had read before and would
read again, find instruction and even corroboration in writers
who, miraculously, seemed neither afraid nor ashamed to
reveal their inadequacies, their disappointments, and whose
very failures went some way to strengthen him in his long
search for a fellow spirit, and, in the absence of such a spirit,
for an understanding of his own life. (p90).

Brookner renaissance
Brookner's third novel Look At Me (1983) is on The
Guardian's list of "1000 novels everyone must read." That's
incredible because it was one of Brookner's most despised. I
think it's brilliant and personally tragic and quite raw. I
believe Brookner was referring to Look At Me in this 2002
interview in The Independent when she said, "I hate those
early novels. I think they're crap. Maybe I needed to write
them... They're morbid, they're introspective and they lead
to no revelations."
(When asked, "Has she a favourite among her works?" She
replied, "I don't like any of them very much.")

Criticisms of Brookner
Criticisms of Brookner are insightful insofar as they i) generate an
epistemology of the Brookner text and ii) reflect contemporary
expectations of text, context and reader. In my research I've
discovered that the Brookner "paratext" - ie the text created
about the author and her work by the media and publisher in
book reviews and author interviews - has been a dominant
influence on readings of Brookner. As a result I've been
particularly interested in Brookner reviews and interviews.
While the distinction between book reviews, interviews and
academic criticism has been necessary, useful and instructive on
matters of genre, at times it is also artificial and so lately i've been
less keen to maintain a formal division in my readings of Brookner.
I have an idea to blog about the spectrum of criticism that

characterises Brookner reception. For now i've focused on the

reviews but I may involve the other genres of criticism at a later
stage. I've divided the criticisms into a number of categories, which
i'll set out below and provide some examples. I have a vague plan
to develop some informal reflections on each criticism in individual
posts.
I've chosen to represent generally negative criticisms
because they're more interesting and they have been most
influential in producing the dominant signification of
Brookner. "I'm interested in the reasons for failure,"
Brookner said in a Publisher's Weekly interview in 1985. And
in 2001 she told The Observer that failure was "much more
interesting than success."
Cataloging Criticism
I've divided criticisms into the following categories:
Plotless; Repetitive/Boring; Depressing; The Brooknerine
(Brookner's protagonists); Brookner Bashing; Time; Age; Place; The
19th Century Influence; Jamesian; Middlebrow; Privilege;
Autobiographical; Unethical writing; Effect on Readers; Declining
standard; Strangeness; Genre crossing; Misc.
Categories to add: Sex. Sex is an interesting case because it's
generally dissimulated through every other topic. For
example "lonely" is a polite way of saying not sexually
active, a heterosexual failure, of ambiguous sexual
identification, gay or closeted.
Plotless
Like most of her novels, Brief Lives is virtually plotless.
Lindsay Duiguid, The downward drag and the loss of allure, Times
Literary Supplement, August 24-30, 1990, 889. On Brief Lives
(1990).
Anita Brookner has purged her novels of nearly all incident, creating
a kind of anti-plot... for the first 243 of these 275 pages nothing
much happens.
Elizabeth Judd, Making Things Better, The Atlantic Monthly
Vol.291, Iss 3, April 2003, 109. On The Next Big Thing (2003)
(Making Things Better in the US).
Although only 220 pages long, it seems padded and
interminable, its wispy story sabotaged by lengthy,
disorganised and inconsequential passages of Claire's selfanalysis and speculation.
Joyce Carol Oates, Writing for the tortoise market, Times Literary

Supplement, July 30, 1999, 19. On Undue Influence (1999).

There is but one halfpennyworth of showing to an intolerable
amount of telling in Anita Brookner's new novel... An event
such as a visit to a restaurant arrives like an oasis.
Nicholas Clee, Closed circuit, Times Literary Supplement, June 17
1994, 22. On A Private View (1994).
Repetitive / Boring
Brookners tale may have benefited from abridgment as there is
much repetition and superfluous detail here, much like the
protagonist's life.
Jacqueline Seewald, Private View, Library Journal, v122.n6, April
1, 1997, 145. On A Private View (1994) audio recording.
Many early admirers have come to feel, as her novels appear
punctually year by year, that Brookner is writing the same book
over and over again... So we are left with a baffling question: why
would a writer of Brookner's sophistication and intelligence repeat
herself in this obvious fashion?
Angeline Goreau, Family Plot, New York Times Book Review, May
27 2001, 22.
There is much to bore a listener here.
Rochelle Ratner, The Next Big Thing, Library Journal, Vol.128
Iss.12, July 2003, 145. On The Next Big Thing (2003) audio
recording (Making Things Better in the US).
Obsessional themes need not result in repetitive fictions, if the
writer can invent reasonably new characters, situations and plots to
express them; unfortunately there is little that is new or original in
Undue Influence.
Joyce Carol Oates, Writing for the tortoise market, Times Literary
Supplement, July 30, 1999, 19. On Undue Influence (1999).
Last June, when the British edition of this book was published, the
London Review of Books' assessment began as follows: "Anita
Brookner's first novel appeared in 1981. Since then she has
published it again, slightly altered, almost every year"... Such are
the perils of prolific authors; reviews eventually weary of them. And
Brookner stands guilty of being astonishingly productive.
Paul Gray, Understated Outrage at Growing Old, The New Leader,
85, 6, Nov/Dec 2002, 44.
Depressing
Think of the most humiliating thing that has ever happened
to you, the loneliest moment you have ever had, the time

you have thought yourself ugliest and most unloved. Look at

Me will remind you precisely how it felt.
Hermione Lee, Melancholia in Maida Vale, The Observer, 27
March, 1983, 32. On Look at Me (1983).
Her novels are almost unbearable in their unflinching
examination of isolation and disappointment.
Claire Messud, The Stifled Life, New York Times Book Review, Jan
31, 1999, 7. On Falling Slowly (1998).
The Brooknerine;(Brookners protagonists)
Why does the extraordinarily successful Anita Brookner
write popular novels about women who are failures?
Sally Blakeney, Failing females, The Australian, 26 September
1998.
she does look like a bit of a fool.
Barbara Hardy, A Cinderellas loneliness, Times Literary
Supplement, 14 September 1984, 1019. On Hotel du Lac (1984).
Nobody likes dopey hangdog people who bring homemade
quiches to sex trysts
Take my advice. Quit moping. Get out of the house. Go
shopping. Buy a television machine and watch some lovely
humorous comedy programs. Take up a hobby, for heavens
sake. As someone advised me once, go to cafes and say in a
sprightly manner to the person at the next table, That
happened to me once tooThink positively. Enough of this
literary dawdling.
Heather Mallick, Depressive tale lacks substance, Toronto Sun,
September 6, 1998. On Falling Slowly (1998).
Too well-behaved for a full-blown nervous breakdown.
Candice Rodd, Drawing-room despair, Times Literary Supplement,
August 21, 1992, 17.
Brookner bashing
We perhaps begin to long for someone to give her characters a
good shaking and a sensible talking to.
David Allen, Lovers and other dangers, The Australian, 19 October
1996.
I used to think Brookner was a genius, but now I just want
to kick her in the shins.
Heather Mallick, Depressive tale lacks substance, Toronto Sun,
September 6, 1998. On Falling Slowly (1998).

The desire to kick Anita Brookners heroines is always strong.

Jan Dalley, Fraud, Independent on Sunday, 23 August 1992. On
Fraud (1992).
Time
It is almost a novel written out of time.
Barbara Hardy, A Cinderellas loneliness, Times Literary
Supplement, 14 September 1984, 1019. On Hotel du Lac (1984).
Brookners characters occupy only the vaguest of times and places.
Jan Zita Grover, Small expectations: Anita Brookners Novels, The
Womens Review of Books, 11:10, 11 July 1994, 39. General
review.
Brookner muffles the outside world, gives no dates,
mentions no political events, not even the name of a
contemporary novel or play gives a sense of time.
Brenda Niall, Alone again, naturally, The Weekend Australian,
April 7-8, 2001, R15. On The Bay of Angels (2001).
Age
There is something unresolved about their ages.
Gillian Tindall, Safe sorrow, Times Literary Supplement, July 10,
1998, 23. On Falling Slowly (1998).
When one reads of Heather tucking a rug around Rachel's
legs in the car, one wonders if a young woman of twentyseven would do that for another young woman, hardly older,
even in England.
David Plante, They Won Their Life on the Football Pools, The New
York Times Book Review, Sec 7 March 20, 1988, 9. On A Friend
from England (1987).
The use of century rather than of place or era as a point of
reference is paralleled in Brookners fiction by her characters
peculiar ahistoricity.
Jan Zita Grover, Small expectations: Anita Brookners Novels, The
Womens Review of Books, 11:10, 11 July 1994, 39. (General
review).
Self-pity (alone, always) leads to absurdity. No selfconscious older woman could possibly 'welcome' the notion
that an unknown and naked young man might wake to find
her spying on him. As for that 'willingness to talk', the mind
boggles.
Caroline Moore, Baby, its cold outside, The Spectator, London:
Feb 19, 2005, Vol.297, Iss. 9211, 38. On Leaving Home (1995).

Place
Brooknerland is confined mainly to London, with an important
outpost in Paris and smaller ones in other European cities. But seek
not for it on street maps; although actual squares, avenues,
department stores, parks and libraries are named, Brookner's
London is an alternative version that bears only a partial and
deceptive resemblance to the real city... Essentially, it is very unEnglish.
Gillian Tindall, Safe sorrow, Times Literary Supplement, July 10,
1998, 23.
Anita Brookners 20th novel is set in London and southern
France, some time in the 1950s. But in fact, we are nowhere
so much as in Brooknerland.
Lisa Allardice, The Bay of Angels, New Statesman, 14, 678, Oct
15, 2001, 56. On The Bay of Angels (2001).
The 19th Century Influence
Brookners protagonists are endowed with the formality and
asperity of a nineteenth-century heroine.
Patricia Craig, On not being overwhelmed, Times Literary
Supplement, August 29, 1986, 932. On A Misalliance (1986).
Anita Brookner's novels are expert copies of nineteenth-century
novels.
Sven Birkerts, Private View, The New Republic, v212.n17 April 24,
1995, 41. On A Private View (1994).
Jamesian
The difference between Brookner and James, one suddenly realises,
is that James's characters are radically innocent... Brookner's
characters are only radically dull.
Sven Birkerts, Private View, The New Republic, v212.n17 April 24,
1995, 41. On A Private View (1994).

Middlebrow (include non-subversive)

Nostalgia for respectable bourgeois customs is a great appeal in
Brookner's novels.
David Plante, They Won Their Life on the Football Pools, The New
York Times Book Review, Sec 7 March 20, 1988, 9.
Agreeably middlebrow writing
David Allen, British values under scrutiny, The Australian, 8
November, 1997.

Privilege
The real fear in the heroines' lives is not to be found loveless
but classless. Caste rather than class feelings animate
them... obsessed by money while continually denying its
importance. The materialists are always other people; the
vagaries of the vulgar are displayed in orer to distance the
heroines from them.
Alison Light, A Family Romance, New Statesman & Society,
6.n260, July 9, 1993, 33. On A Family Romance (1993).
Her protagonist is again one of those generally passive
people, well provided with money and leisure time, who
suddenly is moved to examine the unlived life.
Authorless review, A Private View, Publishers Weekly, v241.n47
November 21, 1994, 68. On A Private View (1994).
There is no real mystery in a Brookner novel. People (usually
women) in good clothes, with civilised manners and quaint
ways of speaking, inhabit a contained world of exquisitely
decorated rooms and quiet libraries, constantly examining
their emotional landscapes.
Barbara Love, Falling Slowly, Library Journal, 123.30, December
1998, 152. On Falling Slowly (1998).
Autobiographical
There are patches of sentimental, almost self-pitying prose in
Providence - the result of the author's almost total identification
with her heroine.
Michiko Kakutani, Books of the Times, The New York Times, C 1
February, 1984. On Providence (1982).
Jane - Brookner's narrator - a young, solitary, and circumspect
woman who eventually becomes a children's author, tells us a great
deal more about Brookner herself than most of her exquisitely
limned characters.
Donna Seaman, Dolly, Booklist 90.n4 October 15, 1993, 395. On
A Family Romance (1993) (Dolly in the US).
Unethical writing
Her author is cruel.
Barbara Hardy, A Cinderellas loneliness, Times Literary
Supplement, 14 September 1984, 1019. On Hotel du Lac (1984).
Brookner has a strange relish for humiliating her heroines.
Miranda Seymour, The Mistress of Gloom, The Atlantic Monthly,
287, 6, Jun 2001, 107. On The Bay of Angels (2001).

Effect on Readers
Readers who've found many of Ms Brookner's characters
downright maddening in their capacity for hitting upon ways
to stay lonely, depressed and miserable may very well lose
patience with this novel.
Merle Rubin, The Search for a Suitable Suitor, Wall Street Journal
Leisure & Arts, Jan 20, 1999, 1.
I confess to approaching her short novels with a certain degree of
hesitation. As a reader it means being in the company of
desperately unhappy people, whose understanding of their
unhappiness is chillingly accurate.
Ron Charles, Alone, all alone with Anita Brookner again,
Christian Science Monitor, Jan 17, 2000, 17.
Declining standard
Despite the sharp, engaging portraits of unhappy women, i wish
now that Brookner would try again the larger canvas of Family and
Friends, a few novels back, that chronicled a large family (the men
of it too) over many years.
Alice Bloom, A Friend from England, The Hudson Review, 41,
1988-89, 544. On A Friend from England (1987).
Less and less is happening in Brookner's novels. Those of us
who have bought and read all 17 of her books look back to
the youthful, flashing emotion and stormy passages of
Providence, Look at Me or Family and Friends with wonder
and some regret.
Maggie Gee, Dont just do it, have a good think about it, New
Statesman, v126 n4345 August 1, 1997, 47. On Visitors (1997).
Strangeness
A strange and disturbing book.
Sally Emerson, Recent Fiction, Illustrated London News, August
1981, 76. On A Start in Life (1980).
Strangely static.
Brenda Niall, Alone again, naturally, The Weekend Australian,
April 7-8, 2001, R15. On The Bay of Angels (2001).
Strangely devoid of friends.
Brian McFarlane, A small, tenacious addiction to life, The Saturday
Age, 7 April, 2001, E11. On The Bay of Angels (2001).
Genre crossing
Fraud is less a novel than an examination of literary
conscience.

Authorless review, Fraud, Time Magazine v141. N6 (Feb 8, 1993),

83. On Fraud (1992).
More of a character study than a conventional novel.
Sarah A. Smith, Learnt from Life, Times Literary Supplement, May
30 1997, 21. On Visitors (1997).
An author flirting with self-parody.
Nicholas Clee, Closed circuit, Times Literary Supplement, June 17
1994, 22. On A Private View (1994).
A curious inversion of stream-of-consciousness.
Maggie Gee, Dont just do it, have a good think about it, New
Statesman, v126 n4345 August 1, 1997, 47. On Visitors (1997).

The Plot Summary - A Friend from England (1987)

A Friend from England (1987)
The narrator of A Friend from England, Rachel Kennedy, is a single,
32-year-old Londoner and a partner in a bookshop. Set in the
1980s, Rachel recalls a period of time defined by her complicated
responses to the personal decisions made by the "striking" Heather
Livingstone. Following the death of her father years previously,
Rachel inherits Heather's father Oscar as her accountant and is
befriended by the Livingstone family. Rachel idealises the
Livingstones as an image of a "Victorian" family and is
simultaneously fascinated and alienated by their material and
emotional security. Conversely, the Livingstones perceive Rachel as
a "feminist" and someone who might coax Heather out of her
perceived passivity. Throughout the narrative Rachel emphasises
her "extensive" sexual experience, the debilitating effects of her
hydrophobia and comments on the contemporary experience of
women. While socialising with the Livingstone family, Rachel notices
a change in Heather which culminates in Heather's announcement
of her engagement to Michael Sandberg. Rachel's narrative follows
Heather's engagement party, wedding and her return to London
following her honeymoon. After Rachel "outs" Michael in a gay bar,
her narrative then traces Heather's marriage break-up, trip to Italy,
Heather's mother's illness, Heather's return to Italy and subsequent
engagement to an Italian. On a number of occasions, Rachel
confronts Heather about her behaviour and tries to influence her
decisions. Finally Rachel travels to Venice to attempt to persuade
Heather to return to England.

Literature & History paper

Today I am discussing Anita Brookners 10th novel, Brief Lives, first

published in 1990. Brookner has written 23 novels, 8 biographical
studies of Romantic art criticism and numerous essays on art,
literature and history. Despite some popular acclaim such as
winning the Booker prize for Hotel du Lac in 1984 Brookner has
been neglected by critical disciplines. Accused of being boring,
repetitive and old-fashioned, she has been stereotyped as a lonely,
single woman and this has not stimulated the critical imagination.
Brookners particular location in the genre of womens writing
denies the avant-garde readings that her connections to fin-desiecle Aestheticism might otherwise invoke. I believe Brookners
work precipitates a crisis of interpretation as a result of its historical
and generic crossings and their impact on representations of gender
and sexuality. In her art criticism, Brookner defines Romanticism as
a form of behaviour, which I suggest can be interpreted as a mode
of performative behaviour. In my PhD I take the idea of
performative Romanticism, discernible in narrative behaviour, and
use it in conjunction with an intertextual analysis to provide an
alternative reading to the dominant Brookner stereotype.

BL is a novel about a former actress, the strikingly beautiful, iconic

Julia Morton, a woman with an unforgettable stage presence. Its
narrator Fay Dodworth or Faded Worth as one reviewer pointed
out - was also a performer, of less renown, and her representations
of Julia as a cult object are interspersed with other recollections.
The story opens with Fay reading about Julias death at age 85. This
triggers Fays memories of growing up, getting married and meeting
Julia, their holidays in Nice, the death of her husband and her
mother, her affair with Julias husband and his death and her
relationship with Julia and their small circle of acquaintances. Within
Fays narrative are a number of scenes in which Julia now retired
- holds court in the drawing-room of her West London residence,
reinforcing her ascendancy in front of a small group of acolytes.
Fay emphasises that neither she nor Julia really liked each other,
that Julia found her boring, and that she was in fact rather dull and
uninteresting. But at the same time it is a narrative of what Fay
calls her thraldom to Julia, and it reflects her obsession with both
Julias monstrous power and her striking beauty.
Critics found BL depressing, a cheerless read, painful to read
and virtually plotless. A common complaint was that the content
contradicted the title. In Understanding AB, Cheryl Malcolm
Alexander warns, The title may at first appear to be a misnomer
The brevity to which the title refers would seem to have more to do
with the periods of happiness these characters enjoy. And

according to The New York Times, the narrators monumental

gloom makes you wish certain lives in Brief Lives were briefer.
Attention turned to the first person narrator. In her book on
Brookners later fiction, Inger Bjorkman calls the narrator absurd.
In the Hudson Review, Tom Wilhelmus notes that the narrators
tone manages to hide everything including some very
scandalous activity. Alexander claims that Fays narrative was
speculative at best and registers a range of wholly
inconsequential and everyday scenes in the text. Her contention
was that understatement and the supplying of seemingly
inconsequential information are common features of Brookners
writing.
Its true that even by Brookners standards the levels of
inconsequential detail in BL seem unusual and make it
difficult to determine what information is significant. These
details range from banal comments, such as I sat looking at
the humming telephone, and then, very quietly, put it down
(BL, 128) to extemporary narrative techniques, for example,
I remember at the time I went to the hairdressers to
observational detail: through the window a tiny silver plane
was a point of brilliance in a cloudless light blue sky (BL,
133). Representations of the inconsequential also form a
key component of the narrators strategy of selfrepresentation: My activities were completely
inconsequential (BL, 80) or I was too uninteresting to be
eligible (BL, 178), she says.

Getting dressed was the most important part of Julias day, Fay
reports, adding that Julia preferred the artificial climate of her
dressing-room rather than anything more natural or more variable.
Julias histrionics are primarily staged in the drawing-room of her
Onslow Square residence, a room which itself resembles the
dressing-room and a space which invokes the dandys toilette. The
dressing-room mobilises a cast of assistants and in Brief Lives these
roles are performed by both Julias entourage and her audience.
They include her dresser Pearl, a journalist turned dogsbody
Maureen, Julias mother perhaps the most perfect audience of all
and Fay a secondary audience, a matinee audience.
Fay extensively documents Julias hard sexy mannerisms (3), her
strikingly tall slim body (3) her beautiful eyelids, the narrowness
of her feet - necessitating custom made shoes - and her aquiline
beauty. On one particularly shocking occasion, Julia is found in an
ultramarine satin nightgown exposing an expanse of white
shoulder in its way perfect, remarkable by any standards. Fays

observation that Maureen gave the impression of being sexually

null, since she devoted no thought to her hair and clothes (BL,
144) indicates that the narrators focus on the dressing of her main
subject is invested with an erotic significance.
As another of the dandys performative modes, talking is
thematically and technically emphasised in Brief Lives. The name of
the narrator Fay Dodworth, identifies her through the fading of
words that Purdon claimed for Aubrey was constitutive of the brief
life of oral narratives. As a professional singer and radio performer,
Fay had an oral vocation. And as a diseuse or mimic Julia
personifies the dandys mode of performance.
Inevitably arriving at Julias with a gift, Fays offerings become
occasions for Julias adjudicating views on taste, lay rights for her
claims to service and propel the narrators movement through her
local environment as she dispenses with various errands. Fays
narrative refers to over 20 sites around London, rendering traces of
the city that reflect the Baudelairean ephemerality of modern life
that is conjured by the brevity of novels title. By mapping these
sites you can see a visual representation of the space Fays
narrative traverses or the brevity of the late Romantic experience.
Likewise these little maps can act as inserts to the novel,
reconstituting the text in an intertextual reference to Aubreys
paper museums.

Fay travels the streets to attend Julias in-house performances, with

her gifts of tongue, of fruit tart and hothouse peach and madiera
cake (BL, 64, 107). Julia is a cult object to the narrator and so
frequent references to Julias diet of omelettes and whiskey both
imbues it with cult status and reveals the heightened importance
the narrator attributes to food and eating. Fays elegant menus and
the delicate combination of textures, flavours and quantities they
evoke are crafted to effect an aesthetic experience. Eating is
produced as a mode of exchange between the two women and
discourses of consumption are interwoven with those of desire in
BL. This eroticisation of consumption enables the reading of Fays
menus as small love poems to Julia.
Julias deterioration is witnessed over a few short episodes. Firstly,
Fay notices an octave drop in Julias voice, her drawn features, an
untouched whiskey all coinciding with the departure of her
dresser, Pearl and signalling the dissolution of components of the
toilette and audience. Following the loss of Pearl, another type of
jewel is lost and destroyed. Fay arrives at Onslow Sq and is
disproportionately shocked to find Julia wearing only one earring,

a reflection of the dereliction of Julias standards of dressing. Fay

apprehends a gleam by Julias narrow left foot and raises an alert,
yet the slow foot brushes over it, crushing Julia - crushing the jewel
- into the carpet.
Over the course of these disturbing events, Julia begins
tormenting (BL, 162) Fay about the (non-existent) sexual status
of her relationship with Dr Alan Carter, a GP described as rude, (BL,
164) disappointing (BL, 164) and cruel (BL, 174). Incapable of
procuring her desired response, Julia transfers the subject of her
eroticised discourse onto discourses of consumption. Have you
been to bed with him yet? she pries, then, Is he coming to
dinner? Boiling with discomfort, Fay is forced to extend the
invitation to Alan that has effectively been masterminded by Julia.
At this stage things both start to unravel and to come together. Fay
is preparing dinner for Alan Carter, when she is summoned by Julia.
She rushes to Onslow Sq, where Julia continues her interrogation,
simultaneously undressing before Fay to reveal the lingerie of a
cocotte. Trembling, Fay lowers Julia into the sweet-smelling bath,
informing her that she and Carter might go away for a weekend. At
this stage Julia grabs hold of Fay, either falling or pretending to fall,
disarranging Fays hair and ripping her blouse. The two women are
left arm-in-arm in mutual states of undress, before Fay returns
home to finish preparing dinner. But her state of disarray prevents
this from happening. She drops the terrine, sending a spray of
carrot mousse across the floor and greets Carter with a ruined
blouse, a ruined kitchen and a ruined evening. This provides the
catalyst for the end of her thraldom to Julia. However, when Julia
leaves for Spain, Fay notices that she might have been imagining a
decay of which there was no trace (BL, 203) and Julia departs
looking exceedingly chic (BL , 210) in a light grey suit with a fur
coat over her arm.
Thus in BL the even the dandys fall and ruination is problematised.
The novel begins with Fay reflecting on Julias death and ends with
Julias voice inviting Fay to join her. This ephemeral endurance of
the dandy complements the status of ruins for antiquarians such as
John Aubrey.
In the abstract of this paper I pose the question of whether it is
possible to read a contemporary novel as a 19th century
text. By looking at the meaning of the detail in 19thc texts,
and reading Brookners novel through the figure of the
dandy, I attempt to read the text across historical temporalities
and therefore to complicate the way in which Brookner has been
produced as a contemporary novelist.

Brookner's "First Lines"

My sister can quote the opening sentence of a number of her
favourite novels. Despite the fact that I often have certain Brookner
expressions run through my mind, or I find myself quoting Brookner
to explain an experience rather than coming up with my own words
(why reinvent the wheel?), I could only recall the first line of
Brookner's first novel - plus the one I'm currently working on. So i
decided to write them out here.
1. A Start in Life, London: Jonathan Cape, 1981
Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had be ruined by literature.
2. Providence, London: Jonathan Cape, 1982
Kitty Maule was difficult to place.
3. Look at Me, London: Jonathan Cape, 1983
Once a thing is known it can never be unknown.
4. Hotel du Lac, London: Jonathan Cape, 1984
From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey.
5. Family and Friends, London: Jonathan Cape, 1985
Here is Sofka, in a wedding photograph; at least, I assume it is a
wedding, although the bride and groom are absent.
6. A Misalliance, London: Jonathan Cape, 1986
Blanche Vernon occupied her time most usefully in keeping feelings
at bay.
7. A Friend from England, London: Jonathan Cape, 1987
I first got to know Oscar Livingstone in fairly humdrum
circumstances.
8. Latecomers, London: Jonathan Cape, 1988
Hartmann, a voluptuary, lowered a spoonful of brown sugar crystals
into his coffee cup, then placed a square of bitter chocolate on his
tongue, and, while it was dissolving, lit his first cigarette.
9. Lewis Percy, London: Jonathan Cape, 1989
Madame Doche, with an air of appreciation no less generous for
being regularly at her command, took the camembert from Lewis
Percy, prodded it with an expert thumb, pronounced it to be good,
and ushered him into the salon.

10. Brief Lives, London: Jonathan Cape, 1990

Julia died.
11. A Closed Eye, London: Jonathan Cape, 1991
'My dear Lizzie', (she wrote),
12. Fraud, London: Jonathan Cape, 1992
The facts, as far as they could be ascertained, were as follows.
13. A Family Romance, London: Jonathan Cape, 1993; (Dolly in the
US)
I thought of her as the aunt rather than as my aunt, for anything
more intimate would have implied appropriation, or attachment.
14. A Private View, London: Jonathan Cape, 1994
George Bland, in the sun, reflected that now was the moment to
take stock.
15. Incidents in the Rue Laugier, London: Jonathan Cape, 1995
My mother read a lot, sighed a lot, and went to bed early.
16. Altered States, London: Jonathan Cape, 1996
The woman on the station platform had her back to me.
17. Visitors, London: Jonathan Cape, 1997
Towards evening the oppressive heat was tempered by a slight
breeze, although this merely served to power drifts and eddies of a
warmth almost tropical in its intensity.
18. Falling Slowly, London: Viking, 1998
On her way to the London Library, Mrs Eldon, who still thought of
herself as Miriam Sharpe, paused as usual to examine the pictures
in the windows of the Duke Street galleries.
19. Undue Influence, London: Viking, 1999
It is my conviction that everyone is profoundly eccentric.
20. The Bay of Angels, London: Viking, 2001
I read the Blue Fairy Book, the Yellow Fairy Book, and the stories of
Hans Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Charles Perrault.
21. The Next Big Thing, London: Viking, 2002; (Making Things
Better in the US)
Herz had a dream which, when he awoke into a night that was still
black, left him excited and impressed.
22. The Rules of Engagement, London: Viking, 2003

We met, and became friends of a sort, by virtue of the fact that we

started school on the same day.
23. Leaving Home, London: Viking, 2005
Argh! I've lent it to a friend... !

The Brookner Walks Project

Brooknerines are walking protagonists. That is, the main
protagonist of a Brookner novel usually embraces walking as
a personal practice. For the Brooknerine, walking is a mode
of transport, a form of physical exercise and a way of
passing time. It has therapeutical benefits; it makes no
mental demands on the walker but can stimulate thought
and bring clarity. Walking allows the subject to observe the
world and participate in public space while simultaneously
being a solitary practice. Walking locates the Brooknerine in a
contemporary chronotope (time / space context).