The groundbreaking biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers. '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 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.

Details

ISBN13: 9781784744687
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 544
Edition:
Publication Date: 01 Dec 2026
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 24.3(H)x16.5(L)x4.7(W)816
Weight (gm): 816

Author Biography

HERMIONE LEE is a biographer, Professor Emeritus of English Literature and former President of Wolfson College, Oxford. Her writings include biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013) and Tom Stoppard (2020). She is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and in 2024 was made a Dame Grand Cross (GBE) for services to literary scholarship and literature. She lives in Oxford.

Reviews

‘A rich and fascinating book, beautifully written, which grasps the contradictions of Brookner’s character and work’ * Tessa Hadley, author of THE PARTY *
Tremendous… In some ways, Lee’s biography is the exact opposite of a Brookner novel. It has joie de vivre, high humour and energetic compassion for the multiplying complexities of the human mind. It would be hard to think of a better biographer for this uniquely contradictory intellectual * Observer *
Lee…presents Brookner as daring, funny and decisive… [Brookner] surely have recognized the quality of this delicate, judicious and thorough portrait of such a contradictory, uneven, idiosyncratic person * Independent *
Lee offers genuinely transporting literary criticism, unearthing the elegance and complexity of the work… This astute and tireless biography succeeds, against the odds, in unearthing the author * Guardian *
[A] thoroughly absorbing and beguiling biography…surely the woman [Brookner] herself might grudgingly approve * Spectator *
Hermione Lee has written a wonderful biography, fond but not foolish. Her rigour means that she never simply equates the novelist’s heroines with their creator but offers instead a set of nuanced readings show the ways in which art and life were engaged in a constant dialogue * Literary Review *
One emerges from Lee’s biography deeply moved, as much by her heroic scholarly endeavour as by the formidable woman she seeks to uncover. It’s not hard to see why Brookner is finding a new audience among a generation of women choosing...a solitary life * Sunday Times *
Exhaustively researched, psychologically penetrating, and deeply empathetic, this, the first biography of Brookner, brings us to fully understand the brilliant, complex and fascinating person that she was. And the result is magnificent * Daily Telegraph *
Between the silences, secrets and equivocations emerges a gripping and illuminating portrait of a life dedicated to its art. One likes to think that while she might not have fully approved, Brookner would nevertheless admire the result * Financial Times *