Hermione Lee’s Biography Offers Fresh Insight into Enigmatic Author Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner by Hermione Lee review – an enigmatic literary great given her due

A tireless account shines a light on the Booker-winning author’s mysterious early years and the undeserved criticism that accompanied with her success ‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” The first fictional sentence Anita Brookner ever published, aged 53, in A Start in Life, certainly set a tone. If people have heard of Brookner today, Hermione Lee says, they imagine a lonely, cardiganed woman yearning for an absent lover. “This,” says Lee (an emeritus Engl...

By Lucy Atkins