The Brooknerian

...now her account is closed the novels may be seen for what they are: a literary chronicle of life's journey from middle to old age...

(But we noticed, we might rejoin.)

Series 5 of the BBC's A House through Time, available on the iPlayer in the UK, features Montagu Mansions, home to Claire Pitt in Undue Influence.

It is hardly surprising that even such an eminent life-writer as Lee might wonder whether Brookner would have given this book her blessing.

In a post a while back (here), I recalled pitching unsuccessfully a volume of Brookner's essays... *** Anita Brookner Mme de Blazac and I: Memoirs, Essays and Reviews 1981-2011 1.

I've been listening to a couple of Brookner audiobooks.

The new Penguin paperback edition of Strangers (2009), with its introduction by Tessa Hadley (see here) and its thick gatefold or French fold cover, is an opulent affair.

Val Hennessey's interview with Anita Brookner in You Magazine, 9 August 1987, marks the publication of Brookner's seventh novel A Friend from England.

1983's Look at Me finishes with a night walk through London.

'[B]y the paradox implicit in achieved art', Brookner makes her protagonists' predicaments as satisfying as poetry: this was John Bayley's judgement on A Private View in the Spectator in 1994.

When, a few years ago, an early-modern manuscript translation of Tacitus was discovered in Lambeth Palace, the writer's identity was at first a mystery (see here).

Further to recent posts on Brookner photographs and harder-to-find images in particular, I offer this from The Times, June, 1994: John Voos's portrait accompanies a review of A Private View.

Is Brookner our contemporary?

She rarely gives interviews...

In a recent post (here), I pointed to Anita Brookner's prolific, largely uncurated journalistic output.

Continuing a series on the 2026 rebrand: Two further cover images have been added to booksellers' websites.

Announced this week, an event in September at Topping and Company, Bath: Hermione Lee discusses her upcoming biography of Anita Brookner. https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/bath/hermione-lee/

As noted in a recent post (here), I'm fond of Professor Emma Smith's lecture series on Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

An interior hermetically sealed, a tilted head, a clock just edging beyond a quarter past one, a whole afternoon to be got through...

I can't recommend highly enough Professor Emma Smith's podcast lecture series on Shakespeare (here).

Anita Brookner used epigraphs sparingly - in Family and Friends (Goethe), A Closed Eye (James) and Strangers (Freud).

This may, by now, come as a surprise, but Brookner was once disregarded, downgraded and even mocked by her peers.

In an earlier post I asked: In which novel by Anita Brookner is there a reference to the Victorian novelist George Meredith?

In yesterday's Telegraph features magazine, Mick Brown was one of the contributors to a piece called 'The celebrities who are actually nice ... and those who aren't' (available here).

Quiz question requiring deep-cut Brooknerian knowledge: In which novel by Anita Brookner is there a reference to the Victorian novelist George Meredith?