Anita Brookner a Booker winner
Anita Brookner, a late-blooming novelist whose elegant tales of selfaware but emotionally constricted characters, primarily women, brought her Britain’s most prestigious literary award and a reputation as something of a modern-day Jane Austen, died March 10. She was 87.
Her death was first announced in the London Times, but no further details were available.
Brookner had a distinguished career as an art history scholar and professor before she published her first novel at 53. She took up fiction almost as a summertime lark, and with her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, reached new heights of popularity when she unexpectedly won the 1984 Booker Prize.
In more than 20 novels, Brookner explored an austere yet fertile territory in which her reserved characters were often romantically thwarted, wary of engagement of any kind, yet deeply aware of their unfulfilled yearnings. For books so intensely mature and private, they contained little overt passion.
“I felt at one with all those people on the sidelines of life,” the protagonist of Brookner’s 2004 novel, The Rules of Engagement, notes, “forced to contemplate the successful manoeuvres in which others were engaged, obliged to listen politely and to refrain from comment.”
When Hotel du Lac upset J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun to win the 1984 Booker Prize (now the Man Booker), critics praised the ruminative quality of Brookner’s writing, the cut-glass precision of her prose and her dry-eyed sense of self-examination.
For a self-described “spinster” who ignored social invitations, Brookner was suddenly propelled into a new realm of literary renown with which she was never entirely comfortable. She resigned herself to being perceived as a “poor unfortunate creature who writes about poor unfortunate creatures.”
Anita Brookner was born July 16, 1928, in London. Her Polish-born Jewish father worked in a tobacco business. Her mother gave up classical singing when she married.
Brookner received a doctorate in art history from London’s Courtauld Institute of Art in 1954. She spent much of the 1950s studying in Paris. She began teaching in 1959 and continued for 30 years.
Brookner was sometimes asked whether she was too much in love with melancholy. “I don’t think it’s melancholy,” she said in 1989. “I think it’s seriousness. I think there’s a difference. I think people are frightened of seriousness.”