Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner, the novelist, who has died aged 87, specialised in exploring the hidden pressures, ethical dilemmas and repressed emotions that shape ordinary lives, and won the 1984 Booker Prize for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac.

An art historian by profession, Anita Brookner became – in a phrase she coined herself for artists such as Marcel Proust and Gustave Moreau – a “contemporary master of the unlived life”. Her Bookerwinning novel, the story of a genteel middle-aged romantic novelist who meets the man of her dreams but misses her own wedding by remaining in the car, provided a template for some 20 subsequent works in which polite, reticent, educated people – mainly, though not exclusively, women – suffer crises of confidence or conscience, succumb to inertia, stifle their emotions and squirm at the brash vulgarities of modern life.

An art historian by profession, Anita Brookner was notoriously reticent about herself: “I regard myself as an invisible person who briefly became visible,” she said, referring to her Booker triumph. Born July 16 1928, died March 10 2016