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“... So far as the evidence of five novels goes, Anita Brookner has one basic theme, which she varies with considerable and increasing technical resource. All five books are quite short, and all have some of the qualities of what James called the beautiful and blest nouvelle, since they are intensive in plot and on the whole refuse the temptation to broaden into novels ...”

“... an indulgence. No novelist has offered sterner resistance to the glamour of magic realism than Anita Brookner, meticulously recording the particularities of everyday compromise. Nevertheless, she too has thought deeply about the need to rewrite fairy stories. Her new novel is a searching study of innocence, and the limitations of innocence. Lewis ...”

“... says modern art.’ In her discreetly original study of Romanticism and Its Discontents, Anita Brookner quotes Alfred de Musset’s satire, Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet (1836-37). Dupuis and Cotonet are two literal-minded provincials who spend 12 years trying to find out what Romanticism is. At first, it seems to refer to plays which ignore the ...”

“... the idea for this book, and the publishers were free to say no. Andrew Stephen had one defender in Anita Brookner – but the effectiveness of her attack on his attackers was diminished by its appearing in the Observer while that paper was ending its serialisation of the book. He also mounted his own defence, or attack. The day after he had been ...”

“... having made a small but definite act of defiance against a spiritually tyrannical brother. Anita Brookner’s heroine ends as she began, writing a chapter on Eugénie Grandet in her book on Balzac, having lost a lover and acquired the duty of looking after a selfish and dependent father. The wrong choices, in the men’s novels are violent and ...”

“... told that they don’t always enjoy it. In fiction the rich and the rest of us can change places. Anita Brookner’s new novel shows Harriet, who is married to a rich businessman much older than herself, travelling out of London on the Brighton line. The suburban houses by the tracks strike her as ‘poignantly homely, beautifully unassertive’. She ...”

“... student, prim, gauche, improbably starry-eyed, impossibly self-obsessed, a junior version of the Anita Brookner wallflower (i.e. not yet prepared to consign herself to the sad margins of singlehood). But whereas the high-minded Brookner woman is given to maundering over Balzac or Flaubert, Isabel derives her vicarious ...”

“... as they are, as enigmatically unfulfilled (unlike Pym, they did not write novels), and, like the Brookner heroine in Look at me, taking the same involuntary pleasure in the dreary little comedies of daily routine. Pym was a bit despondent about this. ‘It was supposed to be a sort of Margaret Drabble effort,’ she wrote to Philip Larkin, ‘but of course ...”

“... usually reliable, has an odd essay about all the ways in which Angela Carter is not like Anita Brookner; trapped by this initial division, her piece becomes a stutter of differences, as she grinds her chalk in one hand and smoothes her cheese in another: ‘Unlike Hélène Cixous, Anita Brookner is not a ...”

“... able to write oneself into a new way of life, more amusing than the old: in this sense (which is Anita Brookner’s sense) writing is a penance for not being lucky in love but also a way of being livelier than life. Words also preserve memory ‘which would have vanished utterly had he not enclosed it in a fortress of words’ (Christa Wolf). Writing is ...”

“... In what her publishers claim to be the first monograph in English on David, Dr Brookner explains that she sees her book as a ‘preparation’ for more specialised studies at present under way in France and America. It is intended ‘for the general reader whose eye has been arrested by David’s images and whose mind has been haunted or irritated by their supernal energy and conviction ...”

“... a saucer in the other, a signet ring just visible on the finger beneath the saucer’. Ruth, in Anita Brookner’s first novel, was in love with a professor with ‘a neutral, faintly resigned presence’: but Kitty’s case is even more hopeless. Maurice is not only English, but specifically upper-class Gloucestershire; and Kitty loses him to a girl ...”

“... then, how we managed to keep up a sort of friendship for so long.’ The first half-dozen lines of Anita Brookner’s novel suggest the tone, straightforwardly realistic, and tell us the principal subject, the relationship between flamboyant upper-middle-class Julia and Fay, whose father was a cinema manager. The opening chapter’s ten pages enlarge on ...”

“... out an unwritten novel with the Craig Rainian subject of a Martian, miserably stranded on Earth. Anita Brookner should break the reader in more gently. Her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, begins at the highest pitch of her now acclaimed ‘style’: ‘From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey. It was to be supposed that behind the ...”

“... who might be given the same treatment: Barbara Pym, beneath whose twinset beat a passionate heart; Anita Brookner with her neatly tailored outfits and the fine-spun auburn up-do exuding poise and sadness; and all the others who in various ways inhabit their ...”