Anita Brookner Was No Latter-Day Jane Austen
Anita Brookner. Photo: Rex Features
The British novelist Anita Brookner, who died last year at age eighty-seven, suffered from the most misleading of literary reputations. Over the course of several decades and an astonishing twenty-four novels, including the Booker Prize–winning , the prevailing myth held that Brookner wrote conservative, middlebrow stories about dull and repressed women. The novelist Tessa Hadley admitted in the that before reading her, “I’d expected something ladylike, lavender-scented, prissy and precious; I knew as soon as I opened my eyes to her words that this writing was everything opposite to that.” On a recent episode of the podcast, the literary critic and Brookner convert Lucy Scholes said, “For many years, I labored under that rather stupid impression that she wrote novels about spinsters in the worst possible shape and form, in 1990, described Brookner as “a latter-day Jane Austen,” a label oft repeated despite its almost comical inaccuracy.
