Anita Brookner (art And Life)

By (author) Lee Hermione
Description:

''It would be hard to think of a better biographer for this uniquely contradictory intellectual…. piercingly intelligent… Lee’s biography … has joie de vivre, high humour and energetic compassion for the multiplying complexities of the human mind'' The Observer

The groundbreaking biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers.

Anita Brookner was an intensely private person who kept her friends in separate compartments and had secrets she never revealed. She grew tired of the assumption that her lonely heroines were versions of herself, and resisted autobiographical readings of her books. But she gave away many intriguing glimpses of her own family life in interviews, and her own feelings, experiences and preoccupations fill her writings. Her life story, both hidden and exposed, makes compelling reading.

Hermione Lee reveals the full story of a brilliant, idiosyncratic and complex woman and goes deep into Anita Brookner’s marvellous work in all its stylishness and daring.

Praise for Anita Brookner:

‘No one writes with more skill and honesty about the human condition ’ Observer
''So fine a novelist that she deserves to be judged always in a class of her own'' Selina Hastings
''How can anything be so funny and so sad both at once?'' Tessa Hadley, Guardian
‘An icon . . . Wonderful, lucid prose’ Jilly Cooper
‘The beauty and precision of Brookner’s writing is rightly praised . . . but what is less often remarked on is her daring’ Helen Dunmore, The Times

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‘A rich and fascinating book, beautifully written, which grasps the contradictions of Brookner’s character and work’
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Tremendous… In some ways, Lee’s biography is the exact opposite of a Brookner novel. It has joie de vivre, high humour and energetic compassion for the multiplying complexities of the human mind. It would be hard to think of a better biographer for this uniquely contradictory intellectual
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Lee…presents Brookner as daring, funny and decisive… [Brookner] surely have recognized the quality of this delicate, judicious and thorough portrait of such a contradictory, uneven, idiosyncratic person
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Lee offers genuinely transporting literary criticism, unearthing the elegance and complexity of the work… This astute and tireless biography succeeds, against the odds, in unearthing the author
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[A] thoroughly absorbing and beguiling biography…surely the woman [Brookner] herself might grudgingly approve
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Hermione Lee has written a wonderful biography, fond but not foolish. Her rigour means that she never simply equates the novelist’s heroines with their creator but offers instead a set of nuanced readings show the ways in which art and life were engaged in a constant dialogue
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One emerges from Lee’s biography deeply moved, as much by her heroic scholarly endeavour as by the formidable woman she seeks to uncover. It’s not hard to see why Brookner is finding a new audience among a generation of women choosing...a solitary life
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Exhaustively researched, psychologically penetrating, and deeply empathetic, this, the first biography of Brookner, brings us to fully understand the brilliant, complex and fascinating person that she was. And the result is magnificent
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Between the silences, secrets and equivocations emerges a gripping and illuminating portrait of a life dedicated to its art. One likes to think that while she might not have fully