Anita Brookner

AB's Books of the Year 2011

2011-12-14T20:54:00.002+11:00

Hail Stefan Zweig and the faintest indication of AB's thinking of contemporary politics.
Books of the Year (and other years).

NEW BROOKNER: At the Hairdresser's

2011-11-23T13:48:00.005+11:00

I have a hairdresser phobia. Superficially, because who likes to pay to watch themselves make small talk for hours? Also i have problem hair: thick, curly and dyed. So i am not one of those people who experience the hairdresser as some sort of indulgent pampering - the hairdresser is a high-anxiety zone of alert. I remember being in a gym class once and we were all facing the mirror at the front of the room and everyones hair flowed downwards but my hair was heading up towards the ceiling. This is not friendly hair. I hate the hairdressers but actually i go to two different salons - one to get cut and the other to get coloured - and i guess now it's no secret that i'm a masochist. But this also comes from years of experience. My last cutter i saw as i was sailing past his salon. He had curly hair and i rang up that very day and said, 'who's the stylist with curly hair? i want an appointment with him.' Curly-haired people generally need to go to curly-haired hairdressers to get their hair cut. Simply they are the only ones who understand. Curly-haired people nod and smile at other curly-haired people in the street. We are a class and we have class consciousness. My colourist is a great colourist but she has straight hair and i would be more likely to get my hair cut underwater by a junky than entrust her with a pair of scissors. True story, was going to do that once. Moving along.

Exciting news last week from Penguin on the imminent Dec 1st publication of an Anita Brookner e-novella 'At the Hairdresser's.' The occasion will launch their new electronic series Penguin Shorts. Brookner is selected along with eight other authors. Details here.

At first i thought it might be a cruel joke, an elaborate literary hoax, another stereotype. Given that Brookner's name is often used to figure the impossible, the improbable, the incongruous and the uncanny, my response is not all that ridiculous. An Anita Brookner e-novella? That's about as unlikely as an Anita Brookner e-novella!

Case-in-point: In Sam Leith's discussion of Nick Cave's singing e-book he states 'I can't see a huge market for an iPhone edition of Hotel du Lac, with Anita Brookner improvising scat jazz accompanied by a steel band.' Yet what's so ridiculous about this, really? Brooknerines know that Brookner's mother was a professional singer. Additionally, in Brief Lives, Fay is a singer and the novel has quite a few musical references. Brookner is basically set in opposition to anything that signifies as contemporary which is undermining when the contemporary is a euphemism for the real or relevant. Anachronism isn't about ignorance or a lack of friends, it's about contesting the idea that reality is self-evident and not constructed. It's about contesting the way in which empirical formations are constructed as natural. The anachronistic is not about being boring, it's about questioning fashionability. Not only is it irritating that Brookner is not appreciated for this, it's also annoying when her oeuvre is dredged up to underline the contemporaneity of other people's projects. Here, the implication of Leith's comment is that Brookner's novels are one-dimensional and have no contemporary (or futuristic) application. Those of us invested in Brookner's historical art criticism, in Romanticism and in reading the nineteenth century, understand that Brookner's novels problematise temporal determination, are fascinated by the interdependence of temporal categories such as the anachronistic, the contemporary and the future and by extension in historicising these very categories through the nineteenth century. The woman is an historian goddammit! And a member of the avant-garde.

Brookner's immersion in questions of the historical and the contemporary etc, make it especially interesting that she's been curated by Penguin in this first round of their new e-technology venture, Penguin Shorts (similar to their inclusion of Latecomers for Penguin 70th birthday editions.) It's a brilliant reinforcement of Brookner's commercial viability, popularity and cult status.

She's never published a novella before.
Did Penguin commission this e-novella? Or was it just lying around waiting to be handed to someone? While many of her books are now available for download, Brookner has said she writes in longhand, that she doesn't own a computer. Correct me if i'm wrong... Graeme?!

Penguin describes At the Hairdresser's.

I rather hope I shall die at the hairdresser's, for they are bound to know what to do. At least that is what I tell myself.'

Solitude is a familiar burden for Elizabeth Warner. She lives in a basement flat near Victoria and leaves the house only to go shopping and to have her hair done - until a chance encounter at the hairdresser's brings unexpected change. At the Hairdresser's is a deeply moving, unflinchingly observed story about trust and betrayal by one of the greatest writers of contemporary fiction.

The hairdresser does crop up in Brookner novels. It's the public confrontation with the mirror, the production of the historical. Julia's page-boy is maintained by 'Bobby' - in Brief Lives. In Strangers the hairdresser is an Australian.

Carbon dating

2011-10-26T19:29:00.003+11:00

Hey readers! Here's a drawing of Anita Brookner published at The Guardian today. It reminds me of the drawing of Baudelaire by Manet that AB apparently has in her flat. The artist says that she thought AB was observing all her personal failures and victories. I wish the artist would say what they were. What is it that she attributes AB with seeing? If Brookner is a canvas for other people's projections, then i wonder how the modern canvas operates. I wonder how Brookner would think about the differences and similarities between the role of the contemporary artist and that of the nineteenth-century artist.

10 Things To Expect From A Brookner Novel

2011-07-05T08:23:00.002+10:00

Indicative of the power of the reader, book bloggers Thomas from My Porch and Simon from Savidge Reads have initiated the inaugural International Anita Brookner Day, on July 16, Brookner's eighty-third birthday. The unprecedented IABD is a celebration of thirty years of Brookner's fiction and aims to encourage new readers. There are prizes!

Check out my guest post 10 Things To Expect From A Brookner Novel.

Cross-posted at www.petamayer.com

Brookner give-away

2011-04-13T12:25:00.000+10:00

Over at My Porch

International Anita Brookner Day - July 16, 2011

2011-03-15T11:17:00.004+11:00

An avid reader and erudite cosmopolitan, Thomas @ My Porch, has initiated the inaugural International Anita Brookner Day on Brookner's birthday, July 16, 2011, to celebrate 30 years of Brookner's fiction. Simon at Savidge Reads will be co-hosting the proceedings with Thomas.

This is a really remarkable opportunity to open up the discussion on Brookner, to engage with other Brookner fans, to get a sense of the community of her readership and to look at the changing tide of Brookner's reception. The celebrations are open for all. To participate: read an Anita Brookner novel between now and her 83rd birthday on July 16, 2011, let Thomas or Simon know what you thought about it, or post your own Anita Brookner-related post that day.

I'm not sure which book i'll choose yet, but i think it'll be one i haven't studied. I'm leaning towards Fraud. "don't let the cat out!!"

Thomas has even prepared this very smart button for contributors to use.

Other things

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www.petamayer.com

The latest from AB: Books of the Year 2010

2010-12-18T06:54:00.003+11:00

Always exciting to hear her voice: AB's Books of the Year 2010

Anita Brookner - her life and work

2010-11-09T09:43:00.009+11:00

This is the working draft of my entry on AB "her life and work" for The Literary Encyclopedia

Anita Brookner is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art historian and a contemporary British novelist. Brookner was born on July 16, 1928, in Herne Hill, South London. The only child of Maude and Newson Bruckner, the novelist’s family were Polish Jews. Brookner’s father left Poland when he was sixteen and fought for the British in World War I; Brookner’s mother, a professional mezzo-soprano before her marriage, was born in London. The Brookner household comprised an extended family whom Brookner described as being “of such surpassing eccentricity that with the passing of the years I honestly think most of them were mad” (Barber, March, 1983, p.26). The family ran a tobacco-importing business, an interesting fact given that the last known image of the novelist published to accompany a Daily Telegraph interview in 2009 shows her smoking a cigarette. In the same interview, a former student of Brookner’s from the 1960s recalls how Brookner smoked throughout tutorials and encouraged students to smoke as well. In addition to its Freudian connotations, the image reflects Brookner’s quiet subversion, both anachronistic and erotic.

Anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe impacted the family in a number of ways. Cosmetically, it informed the change of name from Bruckner to Brookner as well as Newsom Brookner’s decision to give his daughter the novels of Dickens to read. “My Polish father, who remained very Polish, thought that the best thing he could do for me was to unveil the mysteries of English life which could be found in the novels of Charles Dickens: he really believed that. So I was set to read Dickens at the age of seven, and I read all the novels”, she explained (Haffenden, 1985, p.68). Both creatively and morally, this was to have an enormous effect on Brookner. Fragile health prevented her learning Hebrew and the family shifted to central London in search of a better environment. She attended the James Allen’s School for Girls, Dulwich, and on weekends would escape to the Dulwich Picture Gallery where she received an early initiation in the power of images. Brookner is an atheist, although she once remarked that “You can never betray the people who are dead, so you go on being a public Jew; the dead can’t answer slurs, but I’m here. I would love to think that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but he doesn’t” (Haffenden, 1985, p.67).

Brookner proceeded to Kings College, University of London where she studied history and French literature, before taking up art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art because she “hated history without the pictures” (McGregor, 1982). In 1950, she won a French government scholarship to write her dissertation on the French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) at the École du Louvre, Paris. Assistance came from Sir Anthony Blunt, Director of the Courtauld from 1947 to 1974, who was later discovered to be a Russian spy. “Apparently Blunt tried to recruit me as an agent”, Brookner once said, “But I was too stupid to know what he was on about. He told Peter Wright about it, but he never told me.” (Brookner, April 2, 1989). She has also unquestionably defended Blunt - “He was very kind and conscientious, and he did all he could for the people in his care – he found them grants, jobs. He was a father figure.” (Guppy, July 1998, p.283).

Brookner’s parents objected to her move abroad and refused to support her financially. She supplemented her small stipend by writing articles (like one of her famous subjects, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), whose portrait by Édouard Manet (1832-83) hangs in her Chelsea flat) for the Burlington Magazine and the Times Literary Supplement, commenting that “I was liberated by poverty before I knew what the women’s movement was all about” (Hale, June 1985, p.37). She has frequently described this period as the happiest of her life. A prodigious critical career was set in motion, which has spanned over sixty years and established Brookner as an international authority in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art criticism. The Romantic period, she says, is “of great interest to me, because it’s to do with modes of behaviour, as much as ways of doing things” (Smith, September 1985, p67).

After three years in Paris, Brookner reluctantly returned to London to care for sick parents. She first taught art history at Reading University. In 1967, she was appointed the first female Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge and was a lecturer and then Reader at the Courtauld from 1964 to 1988. Her success as a French Romantic art historian is often disguised by a modest and ironic personal narrative, yet Brookner was considered a pioneer in New Art Criticism and published a number of critical texts including a celebrated monograph on Jacques Louis David, The Genius of the Future: Studies in French Art Criticism and Romanticism and its Discontents. Much of Brookner’s criticism concerns writers and artists who also made significant contributions to the emerging queer canon, such as Charles Baudelaire , Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) and Henry James (1843-1916).

Brookner was considered a “popular star turn” at the Courtauld. Former student and one-time director of the National Gallery, Neil McGregor, recalled that “She insisted that art historians must have the courage of their feelings as well as their convictions” (Guppy, July 1998, p.285). Brookner expressed surprise at the degree to which she enjoyed teaching: “I’m such a nervous person I wouldn’t have thought I’d be good at it. But the students are so amiable. They haven’t yet learned those little hypocrisies. And if they trust you, then you must give them your full attention” (Hale, June 1985, p.37). In 2009, reflecting on her career as a novelist, she said “My real work was as a teacher and an academic, and I loved it. This is really just filling the time” (Brown, 20 Feb 2009).

At the age of fifty-one, Brookner published her first novel, A Start in Life (1980), which shares its title with a 1844 novelette by Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), Un Debut dans la vie, and in which the main protagonist, Dr Ruth Weiss, is a Balzac literary critic. Brookner gave “intense boredom” as the driving force behind her decision to write this novel (Hale. June 1985. p.38). “Since I have nothing better to do, let me see if I can work it out,” she told herself. “Only as an experiment, of course; I have never written fiction before in my life, although I have always wanted to do so” (Brookner, August 1981, p.6). Three publishers rejected the novel before it was picked up by Liz Calder at Jonathan Cape; later, Brookner became a bestseller for Penguin. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac. Immediately following the ceremony it was reported as “somewhat curious” that the Chairman of Judges, historian Richard Cobb, praised the novel as “almost eighteenth-century” (Mayne, 18 October 1984). Meanwhile, journalist Richard Mayne contributed by asking Brookner to comment on her similarities with her main protagonist Edith Hope: “she’s obviously very beautiful. These are characteristics which you share with her. Do you share any others?” (Mayne, 18 October 1984). In 1987, Brookner expanded discussion of the novel by commenting that Edith Hope is “not a twentieth-century heroine, she belongs to the nineteenth century.” (Guppy, Fall 1987, p.161). Similarly, she represented her fifth novel, Family and Friends (1985), as a story about “a nineteenth-century family without a nineteenth century to support it.” (Lee, 4 September 1985). These comments are indicative of the way in which both nineteenth-century and twentieth-century narratives inhabit Brookner’s contemporary fiction. As a result, the texts exhibit a type of chronotopic disjunctiveness which has commonly been associated with more obviously “experimental” writers such as Jeanette Winterson and John Fowles.

Brookner’s novels generally depict a solitary, intelligent and elegant heroine, ironic and privileged, who attempts to reconcile her experience of the world with her expectations. A small number of her novels feature male protagonists, although gender indicators do not substantially alter character or plot in Brookner’s fiction. The “Brooknerine” (male or female) often displays forms of ennui, a broad capacity for self-reflection and, as walking-protagonists, they inevitably guide readers through the streets of inner-city London. The novels are set primarily in contemporary Britain, although trips to the continent are often imagined if not actualised. At times, the Brooknerine’s knowledge of nineteenth-century art and literature informs a misreading of context, but also underwrites a complex narrative voice. Significantly, references to nineteenth-century textual and aesthetic production produce a “nineteenth-century effect” in Brookner’s fiction and denote an archive of intertextual source material in the Brookner text. In A Misalliance (1986), the Jamesian Blanche Vernon’s obsession with the nymphs of Renaissance painting is transferred to life when she meets nymphet Sally Beamish, a woman with a legendary knowledge of love and pleasure. In A Friend from England (1987), Stendhalian Rachel Kennedy expends considerable energy trying to influence Heather Livingstone, while her failure to do so enables a Venetian adventure which elicits amorous revelations in front of Giorgione’s “The Tempest”. Brief Lives (1990) alludes to the “Brief Lives” of seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey (1626-97), who shares a love of the inconsequential with Brookner’s narrator, Fay Dodworth. In Falling Slowly (1998), Beatrice’s deathly premonition is precipitated by a painting by William Turner (1789-1851) at the Tate Gallery. In Undue Influence (1999), Claire Pitt’s fabulous imagination inclines toward multiple forms of self-deception, a tendency which is morally abrogated when read as an instance of the Baudelairean imagination. The novels all engage in some way with the genre of domestic fiction. However, when Nigel Ford put it to Brookner that “love and marriage is also one of your big themes”, she replied “in a certain parodied sense.” (Ford, May, 1990).

Brookner’s early reception (or “first reading”) was produced in an ideological context organised around feminism, postmodernism, historicism and the provisions of the literary marketplace. Popular success notwithstanding, Brookner received widespread criticism for being boring, plotless, anachronistic, repetitive and unoriginal. Reviewing her ninth novel, Lewis Percy (1989), Peter Kemp stereotyped Brookner as the novelist of “migraines, flushes and female malaises” (Kemp, 27 August, 1989). At the same time, some feminists took umbrage at Brookner’s representation of women, asking “How can this still be the way of the world at the end of the twentieth century?” (Steiner, 23 January 2000, p.34). Brookner’s art history retrospectively came under attack, with one critic declaring that it propagated “a wilful lack of context” (Higonnet, 3 November 2000, p.16). The critical consensus was that Brookner was a “spinster novelist” who was out of touch with time and place. Reviews presented her as a figure of popular ridicule and she received little academic attention. As a result, the first reading of Brookner constituted a wholesale devaluation of her oeuvre. She stopped giving interviews, saying “they always get it wrong” (Guppy, July 1998, p.282). Brookner was awarded a CBE in 1990 in the company of A.S. Byatt, but where Byatt was elevated to a DBE in 1999 Brookner has not been similarly honoured.

Ostensibly because both the novelist and her heroines are unmarried, childless and “outdated”, it became standard practice to read the Brookner text as autobiographical fiction. “The bad reviews were partly a dislike of Blanche, and of me since I’m supposed to be all these women I create”, Brookner noted after the publication of A Misalliance. (Guppy, Fall 1987, p.166). Autobiographical criticism continued to foster Brookner’s devaluation, inspiring such insights as “[Brookner] is autobiographical sometimes to excess and even uses red hair like her own in almost every book” (Sadler, 1990, p.ix). Despite the temporal complexity and narrational subtleties of Brookner’s fiction, generic biographical criticism has tended to foreclose awareness of Brookner’s ironic problematization of subjectivity, and especially of gender identity, as when Williams-Wanquet observes that: “The social and historical forces that have fashioned the protagonists constantly correspond to the author’s own spatial and temporal setting… All that serves to set the protagonist realistically in time and space corresponds [sic] to the historical, social and family background to Brookner’s own life” (Williams-Wanquet, 2004, p.29). Such presuppositions about the relation between the author’s life and art have obscured other possibilities of theorisation, in particular in relation to the discourses associated with Decadent and Aestheticist subjects in Brookner’s nineteenth-century art criticism where the privileging of art over life challenged the way in which conventional narratives were deployed to naturalise categories of gender, sexuality, history and representation. “In the nineteenth century it seemed more powerful and valid to dissolve order,” Brookner said. (Haffenden, 1985, p.64).

In Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity, Andrew Bennett discusses how the category of artistic genius is predicated on an initial misreading of the text. (Bennett, 1999). According to Bennett, the contemporaneous misreading of the text occasions its subsequent re-reading in the future, at which time the conditions for historical status may be refigured in favour of the formerly devalued text. Subject to an initial misreading organised around hetero-chronic narratives, Anita Brookner’s oeuvre exemplifies the possibilities engendered by the logic of Romantic posterity. In suggesting alternative ways to read the relationship between art and life, including erotic figurations, the nineteenth-century Aestheticist narratives indicated in Brookner’s criticism suggest alternative ways to read the nineteenth-century effect of her fiction. This momentum was fuelled in the 1990s, when new methodologies for reading nineteenth-century narratives emerged. This became known as “the queering of the nineteenth-century”: texts such as Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet provided strategies that assisted in decoding Brookner’s nineteenth-century narrative production. (Sedgwick, 1990). The staging of nineteenth-century narrative forms and rhetorical devices in Brookner’s contemporary texts can thus be seen to enable the performance of intertextual figures such as the aesthete, the dandy and the flâneur, figures whose contestatory relation to normative gender, sexuality and representational practices deconstruct the methodological presumptions organising Brookner’s first reading. When re-read through a conjunction of nineteenth-century and contemporary epistemologies, the resultant queering of the Brookner text revitalises its status in the contemporary canon.

Bibliography
Barber, Michael. Books and Bookmen. March, 1983.
Bennett, Andrew. Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Brookner, Anita. The Writer. August 1981.
Brookner, Anita. New York Times Book Review. April 2, 1989 v94.
Ford, Nigel. Bookshelf. BBC Radio 4. May, 1990.
Guppy, Shusha. The Paris Review. Fall 1987 n29.
Guppy, Shusha. World and I. July 1998 v13 n7.
Haffenden, John. Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen, 1985.
Hale, Sheila. The Saturday Review. June 1985.
Higonnet, Patrice. The Times Literary Supplement. 3 November 2000.
Kemp, Peter. Sunday Times. 27 August, 1989.
Lee, Hermione. “Book Four”. BBC Radio 4. 4 September 1985.
Mayne, Richard. “Kaleidescope”. BBC Radio 4. 18 October 1984.
McGregor, Sue. “Women’s Hour”. BBC Radio 4, 1982.
Sadler, Lynn Veach. Anita Brookner. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Smith, Amanda. Publishers Weekly. September 1985.
Steiner, Wendy. The New York Times Book Review. 23 January 2000.
Williams-Wanquet, Eileen. Art and Life in the Novels of Anita Brookner: Reading for Life, Subversive Re-writing to Live. Bern: Peter Lang, 2004.

- Thanks to Olivia Mayer, Robert Clark and a reader for their contributions to this piece.

New photo of AB

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Found on flickr. Soft and serious.

Adaptations: Kristen Scott Thomas as Miriam and Sherilyn Fenn as Beatrice in Falling Slowly (1998)

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I don't like the idea of a quintessential Brooknerine, but Kristen Scott Thomas is kind of prototypical.

For Beatrice, I was thinking of the Baroness from The Sound of Music. But AB also mentions Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, which is kind of classic. I think Sherilyn Fenn might be able to do the job quite well.

Escape

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Hermione Lee talking to AB about Family and Friends (1985):

HL: The book begins with a quotation of Goethe. It suggests that rules of middle class family life create sanity but prevent creativity. Is that the premise on which the novel is based?

AB: Absolutely. I think if you obey the rules, which of course you're taught to do, and of course the rules seem very productive, and very praiseworthy and yet the rules are to do with forms of control which of course you must escape. And so quite a conflict is set up, quite early.

AB on Germaine Greer

2010-07-27T16:23:00.005+10:00

I'm going to the launch of Kill Your Darlings, Issue 2 tonight and its feature essay discusses the 40 year anniversary of The Female Eunuch. This reminded me of a comment by AB on GG from her interview with John Haffenden in 1985. AB's remarks follow an exchange about Hotel du Lac including her oft-cited assertion that "You'd have to be crouching in your burrow to see my novels in a feminist way. I do not believe in the all-men-are-swine programme". (I always imagine myself crouching in a burrow after reading this quote and frankly i've never believed in the men-swine equation either). Anyway, i should do a post on AB & feminism at some stage. I love her on female competition and female friendships and I read her as being progressive, in the 80's, for the way in which her comments deconstruct gender oppositions. The next bit is good too:

JH: Hotel du Lac nevertheless enters the list of the contemporary feminist debate to a certain extent.

AB: Yes, I think so, and I rather enjoyed it. But whatever the banner, you know, the competition goes on.

Then later...

JH: Do you study feminist writings?

AB: Only what gets into the popular press; I don't read Spare Rib or anything like that. Germaine Greer is a very intelligent writer; I think she's wrong but she's well worth reading. The Female Eunuch is a fine book, and it's written with great sadness that things should be as they were - that's what saved it - but I couldn't swallow the selective moral blindness that's infected the last book Sex and Destiny. I suppose the first position has been won, but the millenium was not to be found at hand.
Hotel du Lac I meant as a love story pure and simple: love triumphed over temptation. The ideal of love. Basically i don't like adversarial positions. I see no need for them, since life is too complicated and it's rarely just.

On solitude and the autobiographical

2010-07-26T14:02:00.003+10:00

In a 1989 interview, Gail Caldwell raises the issue of the autobiographical presumption that has contributed to Brookner's misreading. She comments that "the uneventful life", a euphemism for the unmarried and the childless, "coupled with the intense intimacy of her novels has led more than one reviewer to speculate that Brookner's fiction is drawn from the well of autobiography". (Here it sounds like Caldwell's alluding to Raddclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness"). She quotes AB as saying that the parallels are:

a load of nonsense. Because solitude is very enriching. Solitude isn't loneliness; that's a very crude mistake. And it's quite an insulting one, too. It's used as a criticism, you see: 'Oh, this poor thing, forced to live in her imagination.' I find this unacceptable.

It wouldn't work if it were autobiographical. It couldn't be shaped. It's some kind of subterranean performance; i don't know what it is. But it's not something I'm burning to get off my chest - certainly not!

Adaptations: Uma Thurman and Anjelica Huston as Fay and Julia in Brief Lives (1990).

2010-07-25T19:16:00.006+10:00

With 2 main protagonists who are performers, this book is AB's most dramatic in the traditional sense.

My other castings:
Mia Farrow as Blanche Vernon in A Misalliance (1986)
Jennifer Connolly as Claire Pitt in Undue Influence (1999)
Christina Ricci as Frances Hinton in Look at Me (1983)
Chloe Sevigny and Maggie Cheung as Rachel and Heather in A Friend from England (1987)

Self-analysis as an art form.

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Asked why she started writing fiction, Brookner replied, "Boredom".

She continued:

and the wish to review my life, which seemed to be drifting in predictable channels. I saw it as a little exercise in self-analysis. What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere. It is an art form in itself.

Self-analysis as an art form; it's a nice counter to Foucault. Clara reminds me here that AB is implicitly talking about art for art's sake. The comment neatly deconstructs the life / art, woman / man, private / public set of binary oppositions through which AB has been misread.

From the Hale interview.

Adaptations: Mia Farrow as Blanche Vernon in A Misalliance (1986)

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Mia Farrow as Blanche Vernon.

She did not expect art to console her. Why should it? It may be that there is no consolation. But, like most people, she did expect it to take her out of herself, and was constantly surprised when it returned her to herself with no comment. The smile of certain nymphs seemed almost to mock her as the finally stood up to go, and their plump arms seemed to usher her, with much ceremony, from the room. For this reason, she always felt slightly reduced by the art of the past, rebuked for her mildness, scorned for her seriousness. The past had its secrets, which she sought very much to know. The National Gallery frequently challenged her assumptions, which was her reason for returning. (M, 9)

"Blanche has become very eccentric"...
This was pretty well undeniable. Blanche went to such lengths... always dressed to the nines, making elliptical remarks that no one knew how to take. Always carrying on about characters in fiction, or characters whom she said should be in fiction, and sipping uninhibitedly from various bottles of wine. (M, 17)

My other castings:
Jennifer Connolly as Claire Pitt in Undue Influence (1999)
Christina Ricci as Frances Hinton in Look at Me (1983)
Chloe Sevigny and Maggie Cheung as Rachel and Heather in A Friend from England (1987)

Adaptations: Jennifer Connolly as Claire Pitt in Undue Influence (1999)

2010-07-24T10:35:00.009+10:00

This is my new series on adapting Brookner for film. I'm casting actors to play characters in Brookner's novels.

Today: Jennifer Connolly as Claire Pitt in Undue Influence (1999)

For previous castings:
Chloe Sevigny and Maggie Cheung as Rachel and Heather in A Friend from England (1987).
Christina Ricci as Frances Hinton in Look at Me (1983)

New series: Casting Brooknerines. Christina Ricci as Frances Hinton in Look at Me (1983)

2010-07-23T18:30:00.004+10:00

New project: casting actors to play Brooknerines in the cinematic adaptations of the novels, all of which i'd be happy to write. Here's my take on A Friend from England.

Today: Christina Ricci as Frances Hinton from Look at Me (1983)

Thanks to Francesco Manzini

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Many thanks to Dr Francesco Manzini for sharing his knowledge with me. I emailed him out-of-the blue to ask some questions about Kliebenstein's reading of Stendhal and his response has been incredibly generous.

23/7: AB on the art of fiction

2010-07-23T10:02:00.003+10:00

Brookner is known for her technical skill but you don't see her resourced as a go-to expert on the art of novel writing. Nevertheless, she makes a few interesting comments on the topic. In 1985 Hermione Lee asked her about her fifth novel Family and Friends (1985)

HL: Why is it written in the present tense?
AB: Ah that's tiresome isn't it.
HL: No it's not.
AB: Ah but the fact is, a book writes itself much more quickly if you use the present tense. You don't have to throw it into the past, it's as if the voices are in your ear. You immerse yourself more with your characters and you feed yourself into their lives. I found it easier, instinctively i found it easier. I can't justify it in any othe way. Writing a book in the past tense is a very formal exercise and you sit down and you think I'm going to tell a story and it happened like this and there's quite a burden laid on you to do it that way, if you do it that way. Writing it in the present tense is marvelous it's like going for a walk with all these people hearing all these voices, you're contemporary with them.

22 July: The thing is to not be too frightened

2010-07-22T14:36:00.006+10:00

Asked to comment re how her books differ from traditional romances, AB replies:

The interesting thing is that women still want to read these romances. i think they read them for consolation. They want to know that it can work out in the end, and it can come out right. My books differ in the sense that they're more realistic- things don't work out. They're more fragmented. There is no safe conclusion. They've been called very depressing. But anyone who has had unhappy experiences won't find them depressing. It's very unrealistic to find them depressing. Life is depressing if you're too frightened of it. The thing is to not be too frightened.

September 6, 1985. Publisher's Weekly with Amanda Smith.

Last night i dreamt that AB was communicating with me, in small messages via email. She was kind of offering encouraging hints without getting narrative. One thing she said was EOK.

Chloe Sevigny as Rachel Kennedy and Maggie Cheung as Heather Livingstone in A Friend from England (1987)

2010-07-20T14:15:00.006+10:00

From Brookner's A Friend from England, Rachel Kennedy is quite an exceptional character. I used to dislike first-person narrators until Rachel came along, now i can see how they're really fun. I'm speed rereading this book at the moment (in tandem with Le rouge et le noir).

Rachel's quote du jour (on the striking, mulish, shrewd and fashionable Heather Livingstone):

When I first met her I thought she must be deaf. When i got to know her better I revised my opinion slightly: I thought she was retarded.

I cast Chloe Sevigny to play Rachel in the Friend from England movie. And Maggie Cheung as Heather.

19/7: Hit by a cab

2010-07-19T17:29:00.003+10:00

To Sheila Hale, AB described herself by quoting Stendhal:

"Like Stendhal, 'I walk along the street marveling at the stars. And i am run over by a cab".

Isn't that the way Beatrice goes in Falling Slowly?

I'm battling it out with the Stendhal at the moment. I'm trying to redraft my chapter on A Friend from England, which depends in part on understanding Georges Kliebenstein's (French) reading of Stendhalian hendiadys. Today my translator contacted me and dropped the whole project, making it just a little more difficult.

Kliebenstein argues that Stendhalian narrative is underwritten by the rhetorical figure of hendiadys. In particular for Stendhal he invokes the "hendiadys croissant" represented in the binary formulation a + A. The idea seems to be that when an event occurs a second time the result is completion, pleasure, success. But if an event occurs 3 times or more the result is incompletion, failure, fiasco.

This is sort've annoying me because i thought the second event, by nature of being unexpected, announced a type of failure. Furthermore, I don't really get how you can read a second narrative event as if there may not be a third, even if that event is not presented in narrative time. Like, who's to say it ends there? For instance, in A Friend from England, there's Heather's failed engagement and marriage to Michael. And then there's her engagement to Marco. Can you read that as successful, just because it's second and different? Rachel predicts it will fail just as the first marriage did...

Not being able to read the Kliebenstein makes it hard to go to the text for an authority. Not having the text on hand (it's still with the translator, hopefully he returns it pronto) exacerbates the project slightly too. It looks like one of those things so hedged with problems that perhaps i don't even need it.

Male Brooknerines

2010-07-18T21:16:00.002+10:00

In some ways, Brooknerines are non-gender specific so i'm kind of taking the piss when i say Male Brooknerines. But recently a few people have suggested books I might like written by male authors with male Brooknerine figures. The Victim by Saul Bellow and William Trevor's short stories. I'll have to check them out. Then this evening i came across this review of "The Misogynist" by Piers Paul Read with a similar theme.

18/7: Bored

2010-07-18T14:14:00.002+10:00

More from the contentious interview with McCrum, with AB satirising her reputation as boring.

Obs: Do you write quickly?

AB: Yes.

Obs: Do you revise a lot?

AB: No, not at all.

Obs: It feels that way, as a reader.

AB: Yes, only one draft.

Obs: So you've now finished the book, and you're a free woman?

AB: Very boring.

Obs: You're bored?

AB: Oh terribly.

17/7: Happy Birthday for 16/7;Friendship

2010-07-17T11:48:00.003+10:00

"Accountability: actions to be explained with full knowledge of emotions and procedures. You get it in the Russian novels: the complete confession. Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy, and that is the grail.”

(From the Sheila Hale interview)

A very interesting concept of friendship. Intimate, intense, self-exposing, self-knowing and yet so independent and autonomous. Fearless.

14/7: Strong Brooknerines

2010-07-14T11:04:00.003+10:00

"I think the women in the book are strong", Brookner told Sue McGregor, in reference to A Start in Life (1980). Spoken about her first novel, it's interesting to wonder what would have happened if this sentiment had become the dominant narrative about the Brooknerine. We'd have to have been living in a different world. I think Brooknerines are strong too. They are outsiders, yet they persist and they are much more emotionally honest than most people. "I think I've been very brave", AB also said about herself (to Michael Barber). I think she's talking about the life she's made for herself, for the most part referencing the truths that she's exposed in her writing.

12/7: ???

2010-07-12T17:24:00.004+10:00

"The worst thing in life is not knowing what is going on".

AB to Caroline Moorehead, The Times Monday March 21, 1983.

I frequently experience this with my thesis.

9/7: Turns

2010-07-09T08:58:00.004+10:00

To Sue McGregor in January, 1982:

AB: My parents wanted me to make a brilliant social success, an even more devastatingly brilliant marriage and apart from that they weren't really that interested, but they were very disappointed.

SMG: Do you feel they would still be disappointed in you?

AB: They would be amazed I think, at what I turned into, it would be something that they couldn't recognise.

Note this was in 1982, when AB had written just two novels.

8/7: Late fruits and flowers

2010-07-08T21:59:00.002+10:00

"I think repression has its uses. Repression sometimes leads to a very fruitful late flowering when you realize you can break the rules at last."

To Hermione Lee, 4 September 1985. This was a televised interview and she looked super cute. My photos of AB taken from the TV monitor come from this interview.

7/7: Making Munitions

2010-07-07T15:51:00.004+10:00

Brookner's interview with Robert McCrum in The Observer January 2001, called "Just don't mention Jane Austen", is one of my favourites because it's hilarious. She is really sarcastic in it and appears to be very resistant to the interview. Or maybe she wasn't feeling well, in which case that's not so good.

There's so many good moments in it that i'm not sure which to pluck out.

McCrum starts off by talking about The Bay of Angels, which incidentally received a lot of attention for the absence of historical context and I'm pretty sure it was shortlisted for some prizes (she says convincingly). McCrum asks AB if there was a particular moment of inspiration for The Bay of Angels.

AB: Well, the curious thing is that i didn't intend to write it. I didn't know I was going to write it, so it came upon me quite suddenly and quite easily and I enjoyed writing it. I'm sorry if it's bleak. I'm sorry if it's mournful. I had a good time, that's all i can say about it.

Here she's saying: get fucked... and again later, when McCrum says "You've been very successful for a late starter", AB replies:

I wouldn't say that. I'm not very popular, because they're bleak and they're mournful and all the rest of it and I get censorious reviews. But I'm only writing fiction. I'm not making munitions, so I think it's acceptable.

6/7: AB in the workplace

2010-07-06T15:15:00.002+10:00

This is a rare, unguarded voice of AB's. She's talking to Sheila Hale in an American publication, The Saturday Review (geez how'd they come up with that name?!) May, 1985. It's a narrative of AB's to expose feminist hypocrisy by illuminating competition between women - a move which implicitly deconstructs gender oppositions. The following exchange took place in the context of a discussion on different female personae.

The author, writes Hale, does not dislike the selfish, manipulative woman - who remains, after all, a kind of ideal - any more than she ever stopped loving her mother: "How could I? She was too innocent." But she does admit to being irritated by one of her not uncommon manifestations. "My idea of a nightmare is to be told that a colleague - an alcoholic, single-parent mother (yes, i'm afraid it usually is a woman) - is about to lose her job because her own mother is dying of cancer and she is herself ill. I hate these adversative positions."

Hale continues: To this I naturally offer a few flabby comments about charity and affirmative action. "No," says Brookner firmly, "it's a false equation. If she keeps the job - and she will - she will come in later every day, telling you that you don't know what it's like to be a single-parent mother."

5/7: I'd like to know how she did it

2010-07-05T16:38:00.005+10:00

In a 1983 interview Michael Barber tried to destabilise a rigid opposition between the beautiful and the non-beautiful. He informed AB that Antonia Fraser had turned herself into a beauty at Oxford. Before that she was considered rather plain.

"I'd like to know how she did it", said AB.

4/7: Other faces of AB

2010-07-04T18:59:00.004+10:00

I love Brookner's interviews because she says such smart and funny things. But my obsession with the interviews is primarily based on the fact that it's often the least interesting or contentious things that have been pasted together to produce the dominant narrative about the author. My July series of AB quotes will be a way to address this imbalance.

SMG: You’ve got a good memory?
AB: Superb.
SMG: Total recollection?
AB: Extraordinary recollection, it’s more or less unconscious.
SMG: Presumably also for conversations?
AB: Yes I think so.

(From Sue McGregor's interview with Anita Brookner (unpublished) Woman’s Hour, B.B.C. Radio Four (London: National Sound Archive, 13 January 1982))

A dominant narrative about AB concerns her low self-esteem. Check this gem:

Anita Brookner is an eminently successful woman… In spite of such achievements the dominant note in her life is the sense of personal inadequacy – a quality she projects into her heroines lives.

Thanks for that insightful piece of literary criticism, Marilyn Demerest Button.
(In “A Losing Tradition: The Exotic Female of Anita Brookner’s Early Fiction”, in ed. Marilyn Demerest Button and Toni Reed, The Foreign Woman in British Literature: Exotics, Aliens, and Outsiders, Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1999, p.173.)

In what constitutes a prohibition on honesty, idiots and other highly educated people seem to confuse self-examination and self-analysis, even modesty, with low self worth. I like the above excerpt from an early AB interview, along with countless other examples, in which she's not as modest as she's frequently portrayed to be.

3/7: Nicholas Nickleby

2010-07-03T19:45:00.003+10:00

Today's quote re Brookner and Charles Dickens was the subject of a funny misunderstanding in the second (of 5) critical studies published on Brookner's fiction, John Skinner's The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance.

Brookner's early immersion in the Dickens oeuvre has been well-documented in her interviews. Her Jewish father gave her Dickens to read every year from when she was a small child. In her Paris Review interview, Brookner explained:

My father, who didn't really understand the English, loved Dickens; he thought Dickens gave a true picture of England, where right always triumphed. I still read a Dickens novel every year and I am still looking for a Nicholas Nickelby!

For some bizarre reasons (possibly a language barrier?) when Skinner mentions this quote in his book, he interprets AB as saying she's still looking for a copy of the book Nicholas Nickleby. Isn't that a crack-up?! I will post the Skinner quote here whe i'm next at uni.

New series: Brookner quote du jour

2010-07-02T14:24:00.002+10:00

To celebrate Brookner's birthday month, every day I'll post a favourite quote from across her interviews.

Today, on work practices: "Irritation and discomfort are a great starter". (Haffenden, 65).

This may be true, unfortunately for me they are also a great stopper.

Intertextual scenes

2010-07-02T13:02:00.003+10:00

Graham Robb reviews AB's Romanticism and its Discontents

AB reviews Graham Robb's Parisians

AB's most recent novel Strangers (2009)

Robb's 2005 text Strangers: homosexual love in the 19th century (review)

My favourite Brookner's

2010-06-28T08:47:00.013+10:00

By popular demand, i present a list of Brookner's 24 novels in order of my favourite.

1. A Misalliance (1986). Hilarious. I love Blanche. There are nymphs and there is wine. "But art is about aristocracy and subversion, a deeper subversion than this."

2. Undue Influence (1999). Busy. Contemporary. Claire is also quite funny - I go to say hysterical but then I change my mind. Lives in her head; the classic misreader. "It was not the first time I had been guilty of a misapprehension". Good walking AB.

3. Falling Slowly (1998). Tragic. Extremely sad. Very beautiful and very funny. Perfect really. Perhaps this would be #1 if i was more objective, less sentimental. Maybe it makes the best gift... bundled with Soundings. (How's that for commodification?) "This was somehow a day on which concentration would not be possible, a day on which words must give way to images... She could not now decide whether a library, any library, was a way out or a way in, a way out of daily life which contained too much confusion and weariness, or a way in to silent communion with true achievement, discarnate, incorporeal, couched in beautiful characters on paper, that smelt finer to her than the most recondite scents... Love was to have been the answer..." <-- And all this just in the first chapter.

4. Visitors (1997). Also hilarious. Dorothea is a cracker. Great minor characters and analysis of youth - something AB excels at. There is gay Steve.

5. Brief Lives (1990). Very smart. Julia is excellent, or should i say, striking and iconic. "Plenty of calories in whiskey".

6. A Friend from England (1987). Quite bizarre. Great motifs and intertextuality. Dedicated to Melbourne's own Carmen Callil (born the day before AB). "It was the anger that saved me. I nurtured it as if it were a sacred flame, a talisman that would protect me throughout this journey into the unknown. Without it I would have felt enormously at risk; with it i felt cold, hard, a bully, a brute. With it I could commit murder. And while my victim, in all innocence, sat at a table in some dingy apartment, waiting for her prospective mother-in-law to serve her with a plate of soup, I armed myself with courage, sought out my finest clothes, smoothed the leather of my conqueror's boots against the calves of my legs, slammed the door of my flat, as if the place were of no consequence to me, and walked out into the street, the dearest place on earth to me at that moment, my face haughty with disapproval". Hello!! What is going on here?!

7. Latecomers (1988). Close to my heart for family reasons but i like the 2 families she establishes. Smart, neat, simple, deep.

8. Fraud (1992). Also hilarious. "Don't let the cat out!"

9. Hotel du Lac (1984). The classic. Very smart and funny. "From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey".

10. A Private View (1994). Because it's Clara's favourite; i'm not really sure why. Also great on the youth character, Katy, or what acts as the figure of the contemporary.

11. The Next Big Thing (2002). I like Julius. "This was a day in which nothing was supposed to happen".

12. Providence (1982). The youthful favourite. Nice representations of the academy.

13. Family and Friends (1985). Pathos.

14. Leaving Home (2005). Something about the Phd on garden design gets me in.

15. A Start in Life (1980). For Ruth.

16. Altered States (1996). Good title.

17. Look at Me (1983). It's difficult. The medical library context.

18. The Bay of Angels (2000). Very intelligent, almost tricky.

19. A Closed Eye (1991). Sad. Epigraph / title = homage to James.

20. Incidents at the rue Laugier (1995). I like the narrative voice.

21. Lewis Percy (1989). Something about brie?

22. The Rules of Engagement (2003). Why *do* the characters have the same name? I should revisit this one re female friendships. "An underfictionalised topic" as AB puts it.

23. Strangers (2009). I've only read it once.

24. A Family Romance (1993). Good on feminism.

There you go. This confirms what i suspected: "the middle period" gets my "box set" vote - the late 90s was peak AB.

AB on Independent Booksellers

2010-04-01T22:21:00.001+11:00

Michael Morpurgo and Anita Brookner have signed up to take part in this year’s Independent Booksellers’ Week (UK).

Booker Prize-winning author Anita Brookner said: “I have never wavered in my loyalty to independent bookshops and visit my local bookshop on average once a week. I know that the owners will get the books I want, engage in discussion, and supply the sort of service that is intimately connected with the whole business of reading.”

from bookseller.com

Contemporary Decadence

2010-03-07T07:57:00.021+11:00

Brookner says that Romanticism is about behaviour, it is therefore recognisable. The same thing can be said of Decadence as a cultural formation. That is, Decadence is an effect of modes of narrative and performative behaviours, which can be read in a number of contemporary contexts.

The snooze button.
Stages a backwards turn. Resists progress narratives. Both negating and enabling, the snooze button produces a highly aestheticised space of pleasure, luxury and fleeting indulgence. A masochistic temporality of delay and suspense.

The list of artificial ingredients.

Comestibles such as the deceptively-named "Power Bar" display an intricate list of ingredients, the ornate and aestheticised effect produces a narrative on the lolly wrapper which is not dissimilar from Huysman's investment in the proper noun in Against Nature.

The Vegan Chocolate Cake
"Oh my God it's so rich!" is a common response to vegan food, as both vegan and non-vegan celebrate transgressing the Sarah Brown rice stereotype, or basically just trip out on sugar and fat. Stages the figure of decadence as the shift between absence (of the normative diet ie animal products) to excess (ie elite and expensive ingredients).

The Green movement
Not unlike the way in which the production of the Vegan Chocolate Cake mimics Decadent cultural production, various practices of the Green movement enact an elite and highly-ritualised and privileged form of cultural knowledge. Ironically elite green knowledge production is often disguised through a backwards turn which invokes a call back to Nature, "back to basics" yet their highly sophisticated forms of ritual and practice and anti-mainstream narratives locate themselves within aristocratic culture. Think Prince Charles.

Obesity narratives in general in mainstream media and childhood obesity narratives in particular
Whereas in nineteenth-century Decadence, fat was produced as a state of Nature, in contemporary narratives, fat is produced - through obesity discourses - as a highly artificial, unnatural and pathological state. In health and fitness narratives, the aestheticised human form is produced as natural, a result of a "balance" in which mind, body and soul are harmonised. Think: the boob job "so they look real".

The natural style as artifice

Here the chaotic, drunken natural style - not accountable to the laws of (map-making) genre convention - produce something which is at the same time a highly subjective and aestheticised elite knowledge performance.

The freehand style, the spelling mistakes, the pencil lines which make the construction process transparent, the personal narrative "yes i'm not a map maker!" constitute a type of informal performance which simultaneously underscores its total commitment to the formal process. Therefore its use of nature is a complete artifice. Think: Cool.

The don't-eat diet
I remember reading a (non-literary hoax) diet in Woman's Day a couple of years ago. The diet recommended sniffing food, instead of eating it, insofar the sense of smell was meant to simulate, correspond, replace, indeed, transcend common mastication. Think Des Esseintes: both in terms of correspondences - in which one sensual experience figures another through a sensory semiotics - and in his enema menu.

Comme des Garcons
Thinking especially of their so-called "anti-perfume" Odeur 53 "a blending 53 non-traditional notes to create a modern and striking scent. Some of these notes being: oxygen, flash of metal, washing drying in the wind, mineral carbon, sand dunes, nail polish, cellulose, pure air of the high mountains, burnt rubber and flaming rock." Sounds like Des Esseintes own perfume concoctions. Similarly, Demeter Fragrances "The Demeter Fragrance Library". I like their "Dirt" and "Fresh Grass" - aestheticised nature, nature-as-artifice- but also "Thunderstorm" and "Funeral House" stage Decadent events. More locally, Kusco Murphy's "Beach hair". No need to go to the horrible beach.

Plage en Seine
Speaking of which, more reasons not to travel out of Paris - or perhaps contemporaneously, in an anti-frankophilia response to the Disneyifying of the French - not to travel there in the first place.

Others to follow:
* David Blaine
- checking email while working [digressive narrative]
- John Galliano candle
- White Lotus
- Beach on the Seine
- auto immune conditions
- syllepsis
- saying no when you mean yes and the retrospective narrative recuperation this produces

Questions for Brookner

2009-12-09T18:36:00.005+11:00

It's funny how often Brookner is accused of repetition. Bom-bom. In the dozen or so interviews with the novelist, she is repeatedly asked the same questions. Probing questions such as "who's your favourite author?" Mostly this is concordant with the historical form of the interview genre or paratext; its function to produce the celebrity author in the literary marketplace, the way it produces a biographical narrative within the context of feminist, twentieth-century fin-de-siecle media, the readership it envisages and the formal concerns of the genre including space and lexicon. Most of Brookner's interviews hail from the 80s (the 1980s) so questions differ from those of contemporary brunch media, which might interrogate last night's menu. I, for one, would really like to know what she ate for dinner last night, or every night last week. Documentation so far consists of yogurt and fruit (spotted by a stalker at Sainsburys) and "a small jar of Marmite and slimming biscuits" (Limits?) as reported by a former student of Brookner's from the Courtauld, Dr ? in Mick Brown's relatively great interview of 2009. Tangentially, I recall an interview where Carmen Cahlil mentions that AB would book a great local French restaurant, and always pick up the bill. What about favourite TV shows? Magazines? Is it true she doesn't have a computer? An email account?

I can't leave the house without people asking me if i've ever met Brookner. It's a horrifying thought, not least because I'm a Romantic who grew up on Barthes and Brookner is a private person. It's as cringe-worthy as the hypothetical question, "if you could invite anyone to a dinner party, who would you choose?" If i was having a dinner party, i wouldn't want to invite a bunch of people that i'd never met. But maybe that's me. Would Brookner want to meet Baudelaire - at 24 when he had green hair? On the other hand - brunch media aside - there are questions i'd like to ask AB. Why would i ask them to her and not pose them and answer them myself? Perhaps she could tell me. My thoughts are that it would be disappointing. My expectations are too high. The emotional effect of the experience would precipitate a considerable degree of narrative recuperation, at which stage it would cease to be authentic.

For now i'd like to ask her to comment on the relationship between "the outsider" (or the exile, a term with which she seems allied) and "the family". Brooknerines are outsiders with enmeshed relationships to the family. I'd like AB to comment on ways in which she understands the connection between the family and the outsider, and how she reads this in a broader context of aesthetic production, Romanticism and the avant garde.

Our key thinkers on key thinkers

2009-11-26T05:27:00.003+11:00

From the Unimelb Key Thinkers series on SlowTV at The Monthly

Brookner as Critical Thinker, Academic, Intellectual, Scholar, Historian.

2009-11-25T20:29:00.003+11:00

Books, Essays and Criticism, Chapters in Books by Anita Brookner Compiled by Yukiko (Ito) Kitamura

Books
1. An Iconography of Cecil Rhodes, Oxford: Rhodes Trust, 1956.
2. J. A. Dominique Ingres, London: Purnell, 1965.
3. David, London: Purnell, 1967.
4. Watteau, London: Hamlyn, 1968; Paris: O.D.E.G.E., 1969 (Traduit de l'anglais par Claude Ciccione).
5. The Genius of the Future: Studies in French Art Criticism, London: Phaidon, 1971, published as The Genius of the Future: Essays in French Art Criticism: Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, the Brothers Goncourt, Huysmans, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988.
6. Greuze: the Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon, London: Elek, 1972; Greenwich, C. T.: New York Graphic Society, 1974.
7. Jacques-Louis David: A Personal Interpretation, London: Published for the British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1974 (Lecture on Aspects of Art: Henriette Hertz Trust of the British Academy).
Jacques-Louis David, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980; New York: Harper, 1981; New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987; Paris: Armand Colin, 1990 (Traduit de l'anglais par Louis Evrard).
8. Soundings, London: Harvill Press, 1997.
9. Romanticism and Its Discontents, London: Viking, 2000; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000; London: Penguin Books, 2001.

1955
The Burlington Magazine

April, vol. XCVII, no. 625, "The Literature of Art," rev. of Cubist Aesthetic Theories, by Christopher Gray, p.122.
1956
The Burlington Magazine

May, vol. XCVIII, no. 638, "Jean-Baptiste Greuze I," pp.157-162.
June, vol. XCVIII, no. 639, "Jean-Baptiste Greuze II," pp.192-199.
July, vol. XCVIII, no. 640, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions:Drawings at Messrs Wildenstein," p.249.
November, vol. XCVIII, no. 644, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," p.422.
December, vol. XCVIII, no. 645, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.458-459.
1957
Apollo

vol.65, "Chinoiserie in French Painting," pp.253-257.
vol.66, "Masterpieces in the Dijon Museum," pp.165-169.
The Burlington Magazine

January, vol. XCIX, no. 646, "The Literature of Art," rev. of P. A. Hall: Sa Correspondance de Famille, ed. Karl Asplund, pp.31-32.
February, vol. XCIX, no. 647, "The Literature of Art," rev. of The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies, by Charles Baudelaire, trans. Jonathan Mayne, p.64.
February, vol. XCIX, no. 647, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," p.68.
March, vol. XCIX, no. 648, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," p.104.
April, vol. XCIX, no. 649, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.132-135.
May, vol. XCIX, no. 650, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.170-171.
June, vol. XCIX, no. 651, "The Literature of Art," rev. of The Painter's Eye: Henry James: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. John L. Sweeney, pp.213-214.
June, vol. XCIX, no. 651, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.215-219.
July, vol. XCIX, no. 652, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.248-251.
August, vol. XCIX, no. 653, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.287-288.
September, vol. XCIX, no. 654, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: France," p.324.
November, vol. XCIX, no. 656, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," p.396.
December, vol. XCIX, no. 657, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.430-431.
1958
Apollo

vol.68, "Aspects of Neo-Classicism in French Painting," pp.67-73.
The Burlington Magazine

January, vol. C, no. 658, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.35-36.
February, vol. C, no. 659, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," p.69.
May, vol. C, no. 662, "Shorter Notices: Bonjour Tristesse," rev. of the exhibition of Bernard Buffet, p.175.
May, vol. C, no. 662, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.182-185.
August, vol. C, no. 665, "The Literature of Art," rev. of Prud'hon, by Georges Grappe, p.292.
November, vol. C, no. 668, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.404-405.
December, vol. C, no. 669, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.450-453.
1959
1960
The Burlington Magazine

April, vol. CII, no. 685, "The Literature of Art," rev. of Deux Critiques d'Art l'Epoque Romantique, by Pontus Grate. p.171.
1961
The Burlington Magazine

March, vol. CIII, no. 696, "The Literature of Art," rev. of The Paintings of Fragonard, by Georges Wildenstein, p.111.
November, vol. CIII, no. 704, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: London," pp.476-478.
December, vol. CIII, no. 705, "Letters: American Abstract Paintings," p.513.
December, vol. CIII, no. 705, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: London" pp.523-525.
1962
The Burlington Magazine

January, vol. CIV, no. 706, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.44-45.
February, vol. CIV, no. 707, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: London," pp.91-92.
March, vol. CIV, no. 708, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: London," pp.129-133.
April, vol. CIV, no. 709, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: London: Old Masters at Colnaghi's," pp.170-177.
May, vol. CIV, no. 710, "The Literature of Art," rev. of Art de France: Revue annuelle de l'art ancien et moderne, vol. I, p.219.
May, vol. CIV, no. 710, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.221-223.
June, vol. CIV, no. 711, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: London," pp.271-275.
July, vol. CIV, no. 712, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: London," pp.313-317.
August, vol. CIV, no. 713, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris," pp.361-364.
October, vol. CIV, no. 715, "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Ghent and Paris," p.445.
1963
1964
The Burlington Magazine

June, vol. CVI, no. 735, "Art Historians and Art Critic - VII: Charles Baudelaire," pp. 269-279.
November, vol. CVI, no. 740, "The Literature of Art," rev. of Paul Marc Joseph Chenavard : Artist of 1848, by Joseph C. Sloane, pp.517-518.
1965
The Burlington Magazine

December, vol. CVII, no. 753, "The Literature of Art," rev. of Diderot Studies V, ed. Otis Fellows, pp.635-636.
1966
1967
The Burlington Magazine

May, vol. CIV, no. 770, "From Anita Brookner to Michael Levey: An Open Letter," pp.308-310.
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
The Times Literary Supplement

10 January, "Dark Ghost on a Tilting Bed," rev. of Delacroix: The Death of Sardanapalus, by Jack J. Spector, p.35.
7 March, "Propagandist of the Pauvre moi," rev. of Baudelaire: Salon de 1846, ed. David Kelley, p.248. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.86-92.
21 March, "The Story and the Image," rev. of The Artist and Writer in France: Essays in Honour of Jean Seznec, by Francis Haskell, Anthony Levi and Robert Shackleton, p.300.
3 October, "The Rethoric of Sensations," Salons, Volume I: 1759, 1761, 1763, by Denis Diderot, ed. Jean Seznec and Jean Adhemar, p.1139. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.70-77.
1976
The Times Literary Supplement

9 January, "Patterns of Alarm," rev. of Gericault, by Charles Clement, introduction et supplement par Lorenz Eitner, pp.33-34.
30 January, "Stranded in France," rev. of The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay) Volumes V and VI, ed. Joyce Hemlow, p.103.
27 February, "Another Word for Feeling," rev. of the Constable exhibition at the Tate Gallery, p.226.
11 June, "Night Thoughts from Nohant," rev. of George Sand: A Biography, by Ruth Jordan, pp.686-687.
23 July, "Supporting Features," rev. of the exhibition Faces as Art at the 15 Carlton House Terrace, p.922.
5 November, "Notre pere de Paris," rev. of Victor Hugo, by Joanna Richardson, p.1386.
19 November, "The Pleasure Principle," rev. of The Doctor's Wife, by Brian Moore, p.1445.
31 December, "Homage to Ledoux," rev. of Thomas Jefferson's Paris, by Howard C. Rice, Jr., p.1632.
1977
The Burlington Magazine

November, vol. CXIX, no. 896, "The Literature of Art," rev. of Ingres, by Jon Whiteley, p.788.
The Times Literary Supplement

21 January, "The Resonance of Mme Moitessier," comment on the portrait by Ingres, p.69.
18 February, "Strongly Disadvantages," rev. of Turnstiles, by Ursula Holden, p.173.
18 March, "Incantation to Inertia," rev. of Gustave Moreau, by Pierre-Louis Mathieu, p.300. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.115-120.
1 April, "Unholy Wedlock," rev. of The Marriage Ring, by Paddy Kitchen and Dulan Barber, and An Evil Streak, by Andrea Newman, p.393.
29 April, "Thoroughly Rotten," rev. of Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, by David Graham Phillips, p.537.
6 May, "The Romantic Lover's Handbook," rev. of Letters a Madame Recamier (1807-1830), by Benjamin Constant, p.552.
13 May, "What Marcie Knew," rev. of Oliver's Story, by Erich Segal, p.581.
24 June, "In a Russia of the Mind," rev. of The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev, by V. S. Pritchett, p.767.
8 July, "Foundling to the Rescue," rev. of The Country Waif, by George Sand, p.821.
7 October, "Continental Drift," rev. of The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough, p.1135.
21 October, "On to Life's Stormy Seas," rev. of Chateaubriand, Volume I: The Longed-for Tempests, by George D. Painter, p.1239.
25 November, "Urged Downwards," rev. of Baggarman, Thief, by Irwin Shaw, p.1373.
30 December, "Signs of Old Age," rev. of the exhibition of Paul Joyce's Photographs of Elders, p.1526.
1978
The Times Literary Supplement

27 January, "The Last of the Old Masters," rev. of the exhibition of Gustave Courbet at the Royal Academy, p.91. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.110-114.
24 February, "Preparing for the Panto," rev. of Minutes to Midnight, by Nancy Spain, p.227.
7 April, "Executive Sweetie," rev. of Bloodline, by Sidney Sheldon, p.369.
5 May, "Composer's Block," rev. of Cesar and Augusta, by Ronald Harwood, p.493.
26 May, "A Cocotte Come to God," rev. of Mes Cahiers Bleus, by Liane de Pougy, p.585.
23 June, "Breaking the Pattern," rev. of the collection Hirsch, p.705.
7 July, "Hokum Tenens," rev. of Past Imperfect: An Autobiography, by Joan Collins, p.758.
14 July, "Old Viennese Obsessions," rev. of Reigning Passions, by Kathrin Perutz, p.789.
4 August, "The Beautiful Belgiojoso," rev. of Cristina: Portraits of a Princess, by Beth Archer Brombert, p.889.
8 September, "Sight Unseen," rev. of A Family Album, by David Galloway, and Picture Palace, by Paul Theroux, p.985.
13 October, "Researching at the Ritz," rev. of Other People's Letters, by Mina Curtiss, p.1144.
20 October, "Boardroom Eyes," comment on the TV program The Foundation, p.1216.
1979
The Burlington Magazine

May, vol. CXXI, no. 914, "The Literature of Art," rev. of The Dawn of Bohemianism, by George Levitine, pp.331-332.
The Times Literary Supplement

23 November, "Sisterhood of the Brush," rev. of The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, by Germaine Greer, p.15.
21 December, "The Willing Victim," rev. of Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask, by Robert F. Storey, p.151. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.129-135.
1980
The Burlington Magazine

November, vol. CXXII, no. 932, "The Literature of Art: An Assessment of Couture," rev. of Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision, by Albert Boime, pp.768 and 771.
The Times Literary Supplement

18 January, "The Master of the Attributions," rev. of Being Bernard Berenson: A Biography, by Meryle Secrest, and Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur, by Ernest Samuels, pp.51-52. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.93-102.
8 February, "Rousseau and the Social Contract," pp.149-151. Reprinted as "Rousseau's Social Contract" in Soundings (1997), pp.50-69.
22 February, "The Return of the Earth Mother," rev. of Puffball, by Fay Weldon, p.202.
14 March, "Corinne and Her Coups de Foudre," rev. of Madame de Stael, Don Pedro de Souza: Correspondance, ed. Beatrix d'Andlau, pp.287-288. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.162-170.
21 March, "The Eye of Innocence," rev. of Corot, by Jean Leymarie, pp.317-318. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.103-109.
30 May, "In Pursuit of Happiness," rev. of Stendhal, by Robert Alter, p.599. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.153-161.
20 June, "Bonding against the Patriarchs," rev. of Women's Friendship in Literature, by Janet Todd, p.716.
27 June, "Monsters of the Belle Epoque," rev. of Misia: The Life of Misia Sert, by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, p.730.
8 August, "Between Croisset and Chelsea," rev. of Flaubert and an English Governess: The Quest for Juliet Herbert, by Hermia Oliver, p. 888.
17 October, "The Descent into the Untestable," rev. of Deliberate Regression, by Robert Harbison, p.1167. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.136-143.
14 November, "Cuisine Menteur," rev. of Darling, You Shouldn't Have Gone to So Much Trouble, by Caroline Blackwood and Anna Haycraft, p.1282.
26 December, "God's Great Wager," rev. of The Book of Job, a new translation according to the traditional Hebrew text, with introductions by Moshe Greenberg, Jonas C. Greenfield and Nahum M. Sarna, p.1457. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.206-214.
1981
The Spectator

19 September, "The Feminine Feminist," rev. of Colette: A Biography, by Michele Sarde, trans. by Roger Miller, p.19.
The Times Literary Supplement

13 February, "Sick Servants of the Quill," rev. of The Horror of Life, by Roger L. Williams, pp.155-156. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.144-152.
3 April, "The Observer Obliviated," rev. of Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, by Michael Fried, pp.363-364. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.78-85.
10 April, "Enormities of an Emigree," rev. of Le plus beau de toutes les fete: La correspondance inedite de Madame de Stael et d'Elizabeth Hervey, duchesse de Devonshire, by Victor de Pange, p.411.
14 August, "Fandango-ing to a Fortune," rev. of Le Belle Otero: The Last Great Courtesan, by Charles Castle, p.926.
16 October, "Ploughing a Provincial Furrow," rev. of Rosa Bonheur: A Life and a Legend, by Dore Ashton and Denise Browne Hare, p.1189. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.121-128.
The Writer

August, "On Writing a First Novel," pp.5-6.
1982
London Review of Books

6 May, "Scarsdale Romance," rev. of Mrs Harris, by Diana Trilling, pp.3-5. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.185-195.
2 September, "Women against Men," rev. of The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing, pp.19-20. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.196-205.
The Times Literary Supplement

17 October, "A Romantic Episode," rev. of Fair Ophelia: A Life of Harriet, by Peter Raby, pp.1395-1396.
1983
1984
The Times Literary Supplement

23 March, "Day-Trips to Cythera," rev. of Antoine Watteau, by Donald Posner, pp.299-300.
6 April, "Quarry for the Connoisseur," rev. of the exhibition The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse at the Royal Academy, p.375.
5 October, "The Bibliotheque Nationale," p.1126.
1985
The Burlington Magazine

February, vol. CXXVII, no. 984, "Exhibition Reviews: Paris: Antoine Watteau, 1684-1721," pp.116-117.
August, vol. CXXVII, no. 990, "Book Reviews," rev. of Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth Century Art, by Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, pp.540-541.
The Sunday Times

20 October, "Strangers and Brothers," rev. of A Friendship in Letters: Flaubert and Turgenev, the Completence Correspondence, ed. and trans. Barbara Beaumont, p.44.
10 November, "Gallant: Reports from Exile," rev. of Home Truths: Sixteen Stories, by Mavis Gallant, p.44.
22 December, "A Relentless Entertainer," rev. of Noel Coward: The Complete Stories, with a preface by Martin Tickneruen, p.43.
The Times Literary Supplement

28 June, "A Fortune and a Name," rev. of Marthe, a Woman and Her Family: A Fin-de-siecle Correspondence, by Frederick Brown, pp.718-719.
18 October, "Neglected Fictions," comment on Renee Mauperin, Soeur Philomene, Manette Salomon, Madame Gervaisais, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, p.1179.
29 November, "The State-of-the-Art Crowd," rev. of Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, by Thomas Crow, p.1348.
1986
The Spectator

22 March, "The Sins of the Father," rev. of A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carre, pp.29-30.
19 April, "Terror as an Everyday Affair," rev. of Found in the Street, by Patricia Highsmith, pp.27-28.
24 May, "The Invisibility of Perfection," rev. of Chardin, by Philip Conisbee, pp.32-33.
14 June, "The Loss of Sir Paul," rev. of A Taste for Death, by P. D. James, p.28.
28 June, "At the Height of Her Power," rev. of The Mother's Recompense and Hudson River Bracketed, by Edith Wharton, pp.29-30.
12 July, "Overkill Including the Dog," rev. of The Shrapnel Academy, by Fay Weldon, p.35.
19 July, "The Bitter Fruits of Rejection," rev. of Barbara Pym, by Robert Emmet Long, p.30-31.
26 July, "Failing to Understand Women," rev. of The Women of Guinea Lane, by Gabriel Fielding, p.29.
9 August, "Never Christen a Child With a Toasting-Folk," rev. of Theatre of Sleep: An Anthology of Literary Dreams, by Guido Almansi and Claude Beguin, pp.24-25.
30 August, "Frailty of the Fresh," rev. of Love Unknown, by A. N. Wilson, pp.22-23.
6 September, "Surreal Oxford Junketings," rev. of Dr Gruber's Daughter, by Janice Elliott, p.28.
13 September, "Another Little Drink Wouldn't Do Us Any Good," rev. of The Old Devils, by Kingsley Amis, pp.31-32.
20 September, "A Civil Servant in a Civil War," rev. of The Free Frenchman, by Piers Paul Read, pp.32-33.
11 October, "Deus in Machina," rev. of Roger's Version, by John Updike, pp.38-39.
18 October, "Laureate of the Left," rev. of News from Nowhere, by David Caute, pp.35-36.
25 October, "An Important Woman," rev. of The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings, 1968-1985, by Germaine Greer, pp.31-32.
8 November, "Unfashionable Pride Defeats Our Prejudice," rev. of Expensive Habits, by Maureen Howard, pp.31-32.
29 November, "Comedies of Good Manners," rev. of The Blush and Other Stories, by Elizabeth Taylor, pp.32-35.
The Times Literary Supplement

10 October, "In the Incomparable Spaces," rev. of the exhibition Francois Boucher 1703-1770 at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, p.1137.
1987
Annale Benjamin Constant

Vol.7, Constant in Britain, "On Adolphe," p.91.
The Burlington Magazine

February, vol. CXXIX, no. 1007, "Book Reviews," rev. of Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art, by Michael Levey, pp.121-122.
The Spectator

10 January, "An Uncomfortable Voice," rev. of Marya : A Life, by Joyce Carol Oates, pp.26-27.
14 February, "Reducing Life to Jokes," rev. of The Selkirk Strip, by Ferdinand Mount, pp.40-41.
21 February, "Death in Instalments," rev. of Baroque 'N' Roll, by Brigid Brophy, pp.34-35.
28 February, "Social Feasting and Tribal Fasting," rev. of Seasonal Tribal Feasts, by Stuart Evans, pp.35-36.
28 March, "Down One-Way Streets to Meaner Parts," rev. of A Fatal Inversion, by Barbara Vine, pp.33-34.
4 April, "Journey into Fear," rev. of To the City, by Gillian Tindall, pp.36-37.
11 April, "Fear in a Handful of Pages," rev. of Sugar and Other Stories, by A. S. Byatt, pp.35-37.
18 April, "Black Melancholy Mischief," rev. of The Stories of Muriel Spark, pp.29-30.
2 May, "Too Much of a Muchness," rev. of The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble, pp.29-30.
16 May, "Revenge of the Weird Sisters," rev. of A Summons to Memphis, by Peter Taylor, p.34.
23 May, "Penny, Louisa, Daphne and Alice," rev. of The Last Romantics, by Caroline Seebohm, p.50.
6 June, "A Girl's Best Subject Is Her Mother," rev. of Bluebeard's Egg, by Margaret Atwood and The Garden of the Villa Mollini, by Rose Tremain, p.37.
20 June, "The Shock of the Old," rev. of Captain Vinegar's Commission, by Philip Glazebrook, pp.26-27.
18 July, "By Love Possessed, or Not Really ?," rev. of Worldly Goods, by Elizabeth North, p.30.
1 August, "The Madness of Art," rev. of Henry James : A Life, by Leon Edel, pp.28-29.
5 September, "When Things Come to a Head," rev. of The Case of Thomas N., by John David Morley, pp.32-33.
19 September, "The Pleasures of the Suburbs," rev. of Trust Me, by John Updike, pp.44-45.
26 September, "The Making of a Member of The Group," rev. of How I Grew, by Mary McCarthy, pp.28-29.
3 October, "Quietly Excellent and Very English," rev. of The Gooseboy, by A. L. Barker, p.34.
10 October, "Mysterious Affairs in Style," rev. of The House of Hospitalities, by Emma Tennant, p.38.
17 October, "Time and the single girl," rev. of A Southern Family, by Gail Godwin, pp.36-37.
24 October, "Stupidity Is in the Head of the Beholder," rev. of Three Continents, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, pp.27-29.
31 October, "The Depth of His Potato Love," rev. of More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp.36-37.
14 November, "Just Looking for a Place in the Sun," rev. of The Other Garden, by Francis Wyndham, pp.34-35.
28 November, "Christmas Books I," p.34.
5 December, "The Support of His Mad Mother," rev. of Portrait of a Bonaparte: The Life and Times of Joseph-Napoleon Primoli 1851-1927, by Joanna Richardson, pp.50-51.
The Times Literary Supplement

6 March, "A Nun of Art," rev. of Judith Gautier: A Biography, by Joanna Richardson, pp.235-236. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.171-177.
The Washington Post: Book World

4 January, "Story of Late Love and Sisterhood," rev. of The Magician's Girl, by Doris Grumbach, p.3 and p.13.
1988
The Spectator

16 January, "Things Past and Things Passed on," rev. of The Messiah of Stockholm, by Cynthia Ozick, pp.29-30.
13 February, "Beneath the Surface," rev. of The Bornfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe, pp.37-38.
20 February, "A Kiss Is No Longer Just a Kiss," rev. of You Must Remember This, by Joyce Carol Oates, pp.27-28.
27 February, "Tragedy Rendered Suburban," rev. of The Wedding, by Yann Queffelec, trans. Linda Coverdale, pp.32-33.
26 March, "Memory, Speak but Do Not Condemn," rev. of A Far Cry From Kensington, by Muriel Spark, p.31.
2 April, "An Extremely Wearing Business," rev. of The Fashion Conspiracy, by Nicholas Coleridge, pp.28-29.
30 April, "Getting Rid of the Garbage," rev. of 'S'. A Novel, by John Updike, pp.35-36.
4 June, "Disquiet on the Western Front," rev. of The Silence of the Garden, by William Trevor, p.29.
25 June, "The Importance of Being Alone," rev. of The School of the Genius, by Anthony Storr, p.39.
9 July, "The Primrose Path Dalliance," rev. of Leader of the Band, by Fay Weldon, pp.62-63.
16 July, "Mad about the Girl," rev. of Our Song, by Keith Waterhouse, pp.29-30.
10 September, "The Perils of Biography," rev. of Deceits of Time, by Isabel Colegate, pp.34-35.
17 September, "Bounced Czech Returned to Sender," rev. of A Season in the West, by Piers Paul Read, p.48.
24 September, "New Interests in an Old Setting," rev. of Loving and Giving, by Molly Keane, p.37.
1 October, "Moscow Before the Revolution," rev. of The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald, pp.29-30.
8 October, "Gentle Customs of an Italian Matriarchy," rev. of The Lost Father, by Marina Warner, pp.31-32.
15 October, "Unassuagable Sense of Loss," rev. of The High Road, by Edna O'Brien, p.42.
22 October, "A Storm Is Brewing," rev. of Grace, by Maggie Gee, p.35.
26 November, "Christmas Books I," p.40.
10 December, "Prize-Winning Novels from France," p.39.
1989
The Observer

26 March, "The Blood of Bounders," rev. of Daddy, we Hardly Knew You, by Germaine Greer, p.47.
23 April, "Aches and Pains of Assimilation," rev. of The Club: The Jews of Modern Britain, by Stephen Brook, p.44.
13 August, "The Chink of a Spoon," rev. of Marcel Proust by George Painter, p.41.
29 October, "Novelist�fs Imaginary Museum," rev. of Just Looking: Essays on Art by John Updike, p.49.
The Spectator

21 January, "Things Fall Apart and Cannot Be Glued," rev. of Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler, p.36.
28 January, "Unable to Climb Out of the Abyss," rev. of Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood, pp.32-33.
18 February, "Not Decadent Enough," rev. of The Road from Decadence: From Brothel to Cloister : Selected Letters of J. K. Huysmans, ed. Barbara Beaumont, pp.29-30.
18 March, "A House Is Not a Home," rev. of Have the Men Had Enough?, by Margaret Forster, pp.26-27.
25 March, "Men, Women and the Whole Damn Thing," rev. of The Grown-ups, by Victoria Glendinning, pp.29-30.
8 April, "As Natural As Breathing or Going for a Walk," rev. of Passing On, by Penelope Lively, p.33.
15 April, "Ring of Falsehood," rev. of A Theft, by Saul Bellow, pp.29-30.
6 May, "Looking Everywhere in Anger," rev. of The Cloning of Joanna May, by Fay Weldon, p.31.
13 May, "Happy Child Father to a Happy Man," rev. of Self-Consciousness: A Memoir, by John Updike, and Out on the Marsh, by David Updike, pp.37-38.
1 July, "Decline and Fall of a Dandy," rev. of Baudelaire, by Claude Pichois, pp.23-24.
16 September, "Of Love and Death," rev. of Falling, by Colin Thubron, p.43.
30 September, "The Girls of Slender Connections," rev. of A Natural Curiosity, by Margaret Drabble, p.35.
7 October, "Without a Hint of Melancholy," rev. of Other Prople's Trades, by Primo Levi, pp.34-35.
14 October, "The BCD of Everything," rev. of Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco, pp.33-34.
4 November, "In Need of Considerable Gilding," rev. of The Fly in the Ointment, by Alice Thomas Ellis, p.31.
25 November, "Christmas Books I," p.40.
9 December, "Nostalgia for Something Awful," rev. of An Awfully Big Adventure, by Beryl Bainbridge, p.37.
1990
The Independent Magazine

21 July, "Anita Brookner in a Suburabn Idyll," p.22.
The Independent on Sunday

28 January, "Adrift on the Cote d�fEnnui," rev. of In Transit, by Mavis Gallant, p.22.
11 February, "The Fault-Line between Love and Work," rev. of The New Women and the Old Men, by Ruth Brandon, p.17.
18 February, "A South London Innocent Abroad," rev. of At Home and Abroad, by V. S. Pritchett, p.18.
22 April, "Ay, but to Die, and Go We Know not Where," rev. of The Ruffian on the Stair: Reflections on Death, by Rosemary Dinnage, p.15.
10 June, "The Long Road to Freedom," rev. of Simone de Beauvoir, by Deirdre Bair, p.15.
24 November, "Second Thoughts: Windows onto the Suburbs: Anita Brookner on a Walk in Wandsworth Bridge Road Which Inspired Her Novel Lewis Percy," p.32.
The Observer

7 October, "An Eternal Mademoiselle," rev. of Coco Chanel: A Biography, by Axel Madsen, p.61.
11 November, "Inside the Forest," rev. of The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography, by Gregor von Rezzori, p.67.
The Spectator

6 January, "Winners of the French Prizes," p.27.
20 January, "A Writer in Search of a Subject," rev. of The People and Uncollected Stories, by Bernard Malamud, pp.31-32.
27 January, "The Appeal of Other People's Awful Families," rev. of The Other Side, by Mary Gordon, p.37.
3 March, "Eminent Victorians and Others," rev. of Possession: A Romance, by A. S. Byatt, p.35.
7 April, "...and Dangerous to Know," rev. of Chicago Loop, by Paul Theroux, p.39.
14 April, "Three Women and a Dragon," rev. of Three Times Table, by Sara Maitland, pp.33-34.
21 April, "Spraying into the Path of Real Danger," rev. of Lies of Silence, by Brian Moore, p.31.
26 May, "He Was to Her a Heroine, She to Him a Hero," rev. of Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900-1915, ed. Lyall H. Powers, pp.30-31.
14 July, "Lacking in Passion," rev. of Fellow Passengers: A Novel in Portraits, by Louis Auchincloss, p.28.
11 August, "A Master Unraveller of Balls of String," rev. of Those in Peril, by Nicolas Freeling, p.23.
1 September, "Daisy Pulls it Off," rev. of The Gate of Angels, by Penelope Fitzgerald, pp.31-32.
15 September, "Catastrophe but Not the Death of Hope," rev. of Brazzaville Beach, by William Boyd, p.38.
20 October, "The Different Ages of Women," rev. of Friend of My Youth, by Alice Munro, pp.37-38.
27 October, "Ending the Heartache," rev. of Rabbit at Rest, by John Updike, pp.28-29.
24 November, "Living in the Mirror City," rev. of Janet Frame: An Autobiography, pp.39-40.
1991
The Observer

27 January, "Glad Hearts and Gallantry," rev. of Lucien Leuwen, by Stendhal, trans. H. L. R. Edwards, p.59.
24 February, "Portrait of the Hero as a Fallible Man," rev. of The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754-1762, by Maurice Cranston, p.63.
3 March, "Sloughing Off Despond," rev. of Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, by William Styron, p.59.
10 March, "Adventures of a Virile Woman," rev. of Colette: A Life, by Herbert Lottman, p.60.
14 July, "All the World Her Stage," rev. of Being Divine: A Biography of Sarah Bernhardt, by Ruth Brandon, p.63.
28 July, "A Passionate Tragedy of the Revolution," rev. of Theroigne de Mericourt: A Melancholic Woman during the French Revolution, by Elisabeth Roudinesco, trans. Martin Thom, p.51.
11 August, "Aphrodisiac of Genius: Vienna's Resplendent Energiser of Heroes and the Architectual Golden Boy Who got the Push," rev. of The Bride of the Wind: The Life and Times of Alma Mahler-Werfel, by Susanne Keegan, p.51.
24 November, "Miss Bart Blunders," rev. of The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, p.63.
The Spectator

30 March, "Unfortunate Women of Cambridge," rev. of Air and Angels, by Susan Hill, pp.28-29.
6 April, "Five Tales of One City," rev. of City of the Mind, by Penelope Lively, pp.30-31.
13 April, "Letters to Abroad," rev. of The Queen of the Tambourine, by Jane Gardam, pp.26-27.
4 May, "Alone in a Valuable House," rev. of Family Money, by Nina Bawden, pp.30-31.
11 May, "The Battle of All Mothers," rev. of The Battle for Christabel, by Margaret Forster, p.38.
1 June, "Enduring What Can't Be Mended," rev. of Two Lives, by William Trevor, p.28.
3 August, "Old-Fashioned and Full of Charm," rev. of Letters from Constance, by Mary Hocking, p.31.
14 September, "Death and Corruption in Bath," rev. of The Summer of the Royal, by Isabel Colegate, pp.34-35.
21 September, "Adopting the Necessary Disguise," rev. of Second Best, by David Cook, pp.31-32.
12 October, "More than Sugar and Spice," rev. of Wilderness Tips, by Margaret Atwood, pp.36-37.
26 October, "The Good, the Drab and the Tacky," rev. of Saint Maybe, by Anne Tyler, p.36.
23 November, "Christmas Books I," p.39.
21/28 December, "Prize-Winning Novels of France," p.80.
1992
The Observer

5 April, "Triumph of the Genius and Journeyman," rev. of The Man Who Wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon, by Patrick Marnham, p.63.
26 April, "The Firm Embrace of the Eighteenth Century," rev. of Diderot: A Critical Biography, by P. N. Furbank, p.57.
The Spectator

8 February, "How to Be Very, Very Popular," rev. of A Dubious Legacy, by Mary Wesley, pp.30-31.
25 April, "Messages from Beyond and a Poinsettia," rev. of Inheritance, by David Pryce-Jones, p.41.
2 May, "An Unreconstructed Romantic," rev. of Murder in Estoril, by Edith Templeton, pp.29-30.
6 June, "Studying Foreign Relations," rev. of Sprit Weddings, by Gillian Tindall, pp.43-44.
27 June, "Tracing Grandmother's Footsteps," rev. of I Lock My Door Upon Myself, by Joyce Carol Oates, p.29.
8 August, "Exiles from the Fatherland," rev. of Telling Only Lies, by Jessica Mann, p.23.
29 August, "A Phenomenon Not a Genius," rev. of Trollope, by Victoria Glendinning, p.31.
12 September, "Treating Still with So Much Sweet Behaviour," rev. of A Silent Joy, by Elizabeth Jenkins, p.45.
19 September, "Unable to Bear Very Much Reality," rev. of The Children of Men, by P. D. James, p.31.
17 October, "Men without Women," rev. of A Rather English Marriage, by Angela Lambert, p.28.
21 November, "Christmas Books I" p.38.
19/26 December, "Prize-Winning Novels from France," pp.76-77.
1993
The Observer

21 February, "Conversing Canvases," rev. of Painting and Sculpture in France 1700-1789, by Michael Levey, p.62.
18 April, "The Choosing of Joy, Refusing of Despair," rev. of Some Other Rainbow, by John McCarthy and Jill Morrell, p.61.
30 May, "No Happy Ending for Babes in the Ward," rev. of Murder on Ward Four, by Nick Davies, p.61.
4 July, "Holiday Reading," p.61.
15 August, "Belle's letters envelope the spirit of an age," rev. of Isabelle de Charriere, by C. P. Courtney, p.48.
5 September, "Enlightening," rev. of This Is Not a Story and Other Stories, by Denis Diderot, p.52.
The Spectator

27 February, "Looking Back in Sorrow," rev. of Memories of the Ford Administration, by John Updike, p.30.
6 March 1993, "O for the Voice to Be Still," rev. of The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court, by Peter Taylor, pp.25-26.
13 March, "Telling Tales out of School," rev. of Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence, trans. Francis Steegmuller and Barbara Bray.
20 March, "A Bestseller and a House," rev. of Daphne du Maurier, by Margaret Forster, pp.35-36.
29 May, "Suspicion Torment My Soul," rev. of Second Spring, by Max Egremont, p.31.
24 July, "An American Classic," rev. of Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World, by Carol Brightman, pp.25-26.
31 July, "She Can Fill the Unforgiving Minute with Sixty Seconds' Worth," rev. of The Laughing Academy, by Shena Mackay, p.28.
4 September, "A Family and Its Good Fortune," rev. of The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields, pp.28-29.
16 October, "Three Little Maids from School," rev. of The Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood, p.32.
23 October, "Repose in Taboo'd by Anxiety," rev. of Migraine, by Oliver Sacks, p.33.
20 November, "Christmas Books I," p.37.
1994
London Review of Books

21 July, "On High Heels Up Vesuvius," rev. of Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet: Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert's Muse, by Francine du Plessix Gray, p.18. Reprinted in Soundings (1997), pp.178-184.
The Observer

6 March, "The Death of Innocence," rev. of The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case, by David James Smith, p.18.
26 June, "A Genius for Happiness," rev. of Stendhal, by Jonathan Keates, p.16.
The Spectator

1 January, "Prize-Winning Novels from France," pp.27-28.
15 January, "It's Nicer, Much Nicer, than Nice," rev. of The Matisse Stories, by A. S. Byatt, pp.28-29.
12 February, "My Husband Became a Zombie," rev. of Affliction, by Fay Weldon, pp.29-30.
12 March, "The Age of Innocence," rev. of Land Girls, by Angela Huth, p.28.
14 May, "Even Less Fiction than Stranger," rev. of Le Premier Homme, by Albert Camus, pp.40-41.
11 June, "Her Worldly Trask is Done," rev. of Mothers and Other Lovers, by Joanna Briscoe, pp.49-50.
25 June, "Unflinching in the Face of Disaster," rev. of Mother's Boys, by Margaret Forster, pp.30-31.
3 September, "Appearances to the Contrary," rev. of Going into a Dark House, by Jane Gardam, p.36.
24 September, "Here We Go Round the Prickly Pairs," rev. of Various Miracles, by Carol Shields, p.41.
5 November, "A Servant or a Saint," rev. of The Good Husband, by Gail Godwin, pp.51-52.
19 Nov. 1994, "Christmas Books I," p.47.
1995
The Spectator

4 February, "Hamlet, Though Not Meant to Be," rev. of The Prince of West End Avenue, by Alan Isler, pp.28-29.
4 March, "We Have Stood Apart Stufiously," rev. of An Experiment in Love, by Hilary Mantel, pp.36-37.
29 April, "An Escape, but More than Escapism," rev. of Ladder of Years, by Anne Tyler, p.35.
6 May, "The Story of a Knee," rev. of Therapy, by David Lodge, pp.39-40.
13 May, "Taboo or Not Taboo," rev. of Intimacy, by Julian Rathbone, p.37.
24 June, "A Superb Achievement: A Reconsideration of Kazuo Ishiguro's Unappreciated Novel, The Unconsoled," rev. of The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro, pp.40-41.
15 July, "Following in the Steps of the Master," rev. of Shards of Memory, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, pp.33-34.
26 August, "Active and Passive," rev. of Winter Journey, by Isabel Colegate, pp.28-30.
30 September, "Praise Him for His Well-Turned Symbols," rev. of The Liquidator, by Ferdinand Mount, p.37.
11 November, "Survivng the Sixties," rev. of Hearing Voices, by A. N. Wilson, p.47.
18 November, "Christmas Books I" p.45.
30 December, "Prize-Winning Novels from France," p.32.
1996
The Spectator

13 April, "Who's Left Holding the Baby ?," rev. of Faith Fox, by Jane Gardam, pp.34-35.
27 April, "Faith and the Cinema," rev. of In the Beauty of the Lilies, by John Updike, pp.33-34.
15 June, "Mothers and Daughters," rev. of Shadow Baby, by Margaret Forster, pp.40-41.
22 June, "Thoughts on a Dry Brain in a Dry Season," an essay on Penelope Fitzgerald, pp.35-36.
29 June, "A Memory of Yesterday's Pleasure," rev. of The Orchard on Fire, by Shena Mackay. pp.35-36.
3 August, "Rapture on the Lonely Shore," rev. of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Dmitri Nabokov, p.26.
17 August, "Too True to Be Good," rev. of The Arizona Game, by Georgina Hammick, pp.25-26.
14 September, "A Wretch like Her," rev. of Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood, p.36.
28 September, "In Need of a Few Dirty Tricks," rev. of The Archers: The True Story: The History of Radio's Most Famous Programme, by William Smethurst, p.46.
9 November, "Daughter's Eye View," rev. of Selected Stories, by Alice Munro, p.47.
16 November, "Christmas Books I" p.42.
The Sunday Times

18 February, "A Force of Nature," rev. of Zola: A Life, by Frederick Brown, Section 7 (Books), pp.1-2.
1997
London Review of Books

19 June, "Mme de Blazac and I," pp.16-17.
The Spectator

4 January, "Prize-Winning Novels from France," p.37.
15 March, "If we Shadows Have Offended," rev. of A Nice Change, by Nina Bawden, pp.40-41.
26 April, "Life at the Blunt End," rev. of The Untouchable, by John Banville, pp.39-40.
24 May, "The Sleeve Stays Unravelled," rev. of The House of Sleep, by Jonathan Coe, p.37.
7 June, "A Detective of the Past," rev. of Dora Bruder, by Patrick Modiano, p.49.
19 July, "A Tease of the First Order," rev. of The Weight of Water, by Anita Shreve, p.34.
30 August, "Desire and Pursuit," rev. of Enduring Love, by Ian McEwan, pp.28-29.
13 September, "Adrift in the Male Doldrums," rev. of Women with Men, by Richard Ford, pp.36-37.
27 September, "Farewell, My Lovely," rev. of Night Train, by Martin Amis, pp.36-37.
The Sunday Times

19 October, "From Here to Sublimity: Anita Brookner Reads a Superlative Life of Victor Hugo, a Writer Deemed, Even in His Lifetime, Immortal, Elemental and Superhuman," pp.8/8-8/9.
The Times Literary Supplement

11 April, "The Pleasure of Passing Through," rev. of The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, by Mavis Gallant, p.25.
1998
The Daily Telegraph

16 May 1998, "Book of the Century 19: Anita Brookner Makes Her Choice," rev. of A la recherche du temps perdu, by Marcel Proust, p.3.
The Spectator

3 January, "Prize-Winning Novels from France," p.31.
17 January, "Looking Tragedy in the Face," rev. of The Collected Stories, by Grace Paley, p.33.
31 January, "Magician of the Humdrum," rev. of Toward the End of Time, by John Updike, p.39.
14 March, "The Unmasking of Gerald," rev. of The Chimney Sweeper's Boy, by Barbara Vine, pp.36-37.
28 March, "The Company She Keeps," rev. of The Travelling Horn, by Barbara Trapido, p.30.
9 May, "A Powerful Revenant," rev. of Your Blue-Eyed Boy, by Helen Dunmore, pp.38-39.
6 June 1998, "In the Steps of Zola," rev. of Shadows on the Hudson, by Isaac Bashevis Singer, trans. Joseph Sherman, pp.31-32.
13 June, "Death in the Sun Postponed," rev. of The Last Resort, by Alison Lurie, p.40.
27 June, "The Feel-Good Factor," rev. of A Patchwork Planet, by Anne Tyler, pp.34-35.
29 August, "Saying Goodbye to Proust," rev. of Charlotte Gray, by Sebastian Faulks, p.28.
12 September, "All Good Pals and Jolly Bad Company," rev. of Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan, p.39.
26 September, "The Consequences of a Stroll," rev. of Kitty and Virgil, by Paul Bailey, pp.44-45.
24 October, "The Way We Live Now," rev. of Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore, pp.46-47.
31 October, "A Heroine Who Declines," rev. of The Service of Clouds, by Susan Hill, p.53.
21 November, "Christmas Books I," p.38.
The Sunday Times

23 August, "English Eccentrics,"rev. of A Sight for Sore Eyes, by Ruth Rendell, p.8.
6 September, "Staying Power," rev. of Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion, by Elaine Denby, p.6.
1999
The Spectator

2 January, "Prize-Winning Novels from France," p.35.
16 January, "Days of Elegance," rev. of New York Mosaic: Three Novels, by Isabel Bolton, p.35.
6 February, "The Heat in the Kitchen," rev. of A Slight and Delicate Creature, by Margaret Cook, p.27.
19 June, "Knowing the Score in Old New York," rev. of The Puttermesser Papers, by Cynthia Ozick, p.44.
26 June, "Digging Up Mummy," rev. of The Memory Box, by Margaret Forster, p.34.
17 August, "Violence with Decorum," rev. of The Crime of Olga Arbyelina, by Andrei Makine, trans. Geoffrey Strachan, pp.30-31.
7 August, "Artfully, Seriously Ludic," rev. of Headlong, by Michael Frayn, pp.34-35.
28 August, "Signposts Pointing the Wrong Way," rev. of Destiny, by Tim Parks, pp.36-37.
20 November, "Books of the Year," p.47.
30 October, "Top Marks All Round," rev. of A Time to be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, by P. D. James, pp.57-58.
11 December, "The Master of the Indirect," rev. of Henry James: Collected Stories, Volumes I and II, with the introductions by John Bayley, pp.47-48.
18/25 December, "Pursued Across Europe by Ghosts and Unease," rev. of Vertigo, by W. G. Sebald, trans. Michael Hulse, pp.65-66.
The Sunday Times

24 January, "TB or not TB ?," rev. of The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis, by Thomas Dormandy, p.7.
7 February, "Why Does Proust Matter ?," rev. of Proust, by Edmund White, p.5.
20 June, "Wealth Warning," rev. of The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches: Style and Status in Victorian and Edwardian Architecture, by J. Mordaunt Crook, pp.2-3.
2000
The Daily Telegraph

23 December, "'What a Novel My Life Is !' : Napoleon Was Torn between the Pen and the Sword, Says Anita Brookner," rev. of Napoleon the Novelist, by Andy Martin, p.3.
The Spectator

1 January, "Prize-Winning Novels from France," pp.30-31.
8 January, "Perpetual Youth and Effortless Artistry," rev. of More Matter: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike, p.32.
22 January, "The Confidence of a Lone Wolf," rev. of Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, vol. IV, 1918-1922, ed. Philip Kolb, trans. Joanna Kilmartin, pp.28-29.
12 August, "Escaping from Resentments," rev. of Every Eye, by Isobel English, p.35.
2 September, "Crimes Committed, Punishments Awarded," rev. of Piranha to Scurfy, by Ruth Rendell, p.38.
7 October, "Artfully Administered Shocks," rev. of The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood, pp.50-51.
18 November, "Christmas Books I," p.53.
30 December, "Recent Publications from France," pp.27-28.
Yale Review

October, vol. 88, issue 4, "The Brothers Goncourt: The Breakdown of Joy," pp.28-42. Reprinted in Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000), pp.120-139.
2001
The Spectator

10 February, "Angels of Life and Death," rev. of They Came Like Swallows, by William Maxwell, pp.41-2.
21 April, "Too Narrow the Way," rev. of Strait Is the Gate, by Andre Gide, trans. Dorothy Bussy, p.39.
28 April, "Unique New York," rev. of On Green Dolphin Street, by Sebastian Faulks, p.37.
19 May, "Dutch Decency and Dignity," rev. of Some Day Tomorrow, by Nicholas Freeling, pp.40-41.
2 June, "A Formula That Shows Its Age," rev. of Back When We Were Grownups, by Anne Tyler, pp.40-41.
15 September, "A Morbid Procedure," rev. of Atonement, by Ian McEwan, p.44.
29 September, "Sexual Tourism a Gogo," rev. of Plateforme, by Michel Houellebecq, pp.40-41.
6 October, "A Journey without Maps," rev. of Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald, pp.64-65.
20 October, "The Intolerable Wrestle with Words," rev. of Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall, p.55.
3 November, "Much Matter within a Small Compass," rev. of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, by Alice Munro, pp.52-53.
17 November, "Books of the Year," p.43.
29 December, "Current French Fiction," p.39.
2002
The Spectator

9 March, "'I'm the Other One,'" rev. of Negotiating with the Dead, by Margaret Atwood, pp.44-45.
20 April, "Insouciance of a True Hero," rev. of Any Human Heart, by William Boyd, pp.41-42.
4 May, "Women Talking to Women," rev. of Unless, by Carol Shields, pp.39-40.
3 August, rev. of Wake Up, by Tim Pears, p.35.
31 August, rev. of Light Years, by James Salter, p.36.
26 October, "Southern Gothic Revenge," rev. of The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt, pp.54-5.
28 December, "Prize-Winning Novels from France," p.38.
2003
The Spectator

11 January, "Traditional but Far from Square," rev. of The Easter Parade, by Richard Yates, p.29.
1 March, "Tale of a Survivor," rev. of Diary of an Ordinary Woman, by Margaret Forster, p.52.
15 November, "Christmas Books 1," p.46.
29 November, "A Season in Hell," rev. of Tomber sept fois, se relever huit, by Philippe Labro, p.53.
27 December, "New Books in France," p.37.
2004
The Spectator

3 January, "A Disturbing Absence of Disturbance," rev. of The Amateur Marriage, by Anne Tyler, pp.29-30.

Last revised 23 February 2004.

Contributions to Books
England: Her Friends and Visitors: An Exhibition of Autograph Manuscripts, First Editions, Paintings and Drawings, organized by Desmond Flower and Anita Brookner, London: National Book League, 1956.
"J.-L. David: A Sentimental Classicist," Stil und Uberlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes, vol.I, Berlin: Mann, 1967, pp.184-190.
Great Paintings, ed. Edwin Mullins, London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1981.
Brookner's contributions are chapter 3: Adoration: Rigaud: Portrait of Louis XIV, pp.96-100, chapter 9: Bathing: Ingres: The Turkish Bath, pp.276-280, chapter 9: Cezanne: Baigneuses, pp.288-292.
Introduction of The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy, London: Virago, 1983, pp.ix-xiv.
Introduction of Troy Chimneys, by Margaret Kennedy, London: Virago, 1985, pp.vii-x.
Introduction of The Island of Desire, by Edith Templeton, London: Hogarth, 1985, pp.1-5.
Introduction of Summer in the Country, by Edith Templeton, London: Hogarth, 1985, pp.1-5.
Introduction of Boston Adventure, by Jean Stafford, London: Hogarth, 1986, p.?.
Introduction of Living on Yesterday, by Edith Templeton, London: Hogarth, 1986, pp.1-5.
Introduction of The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton, London: Penguin, 1987, pp.1-4.
Introduction of Sister Philomene, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, trans. Madeline Jay, London: Chatto & Windus, 1989, pp.1-5.
Introduction of The Stories of Edith Wharton, vol. 1, by Edith Wharton, New York: Carroll & Graf, 1990, pp.vii-ix. This introduction was published as the introduction of The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton by Carroll & Graf in 1998, pp.vii-ix.
Introduction of The Stories of Edith Wharton, vol. 2, by Edith Wharton, New York: Carroll & Graf, 1990, pp.vii-x. This introduction was published as the afterword of The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton by Carroll & Graf in 1998, pp.621-624.
Introduction of Looking Back: A Panoramic View of a Literary Age by the Grandes Dames of European Letters, by Shusha Guppy, New York: British American Publishing, 1991, pp.xi-xv.
Introduction of The Reef, by Edith Wharton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994, pp.v-xii.
Introduction of The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, London: Macmillan, 1987, p.?, New York; London: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995, pp.7-14.
Introduction of Madame Bovary: Life in a Country Town, by Gustave Flaubert, trans. Gerard Hopkins, Oxford; New York; Tokyo: Oxford University Press, 1999 (Oxford world's classics; 4), pp.v-xi.
Introduction of Eustace and Hilda: A Trilogy, by L. P. Hartley, New York: New York Review of Books, 2001, pp.ix-xiii.
Introduction of The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, selected, edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller, London: Picador, 2001, pp.xi-xv.
Introduction of The Surprise of Cremona, by Edith Templeton, London: Pallas Editions, 2001, pp.vii-x.
Introduction of The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, New York: Modern Library, 2002, pp.xi-xv.

Brookner's school

2009-11-25T06:59:00.005+11:00

James Allen's Girl's School (JAGS)

Academics on the phone

2009-11-24T14:04:00.004+11:00

Judith Butler, NYU and Michael Kirby, Melbourne University. Taken on my phone.

Brookner on Christmas Books

2009-11-20T22:20:00.001+11:00

For devotees of the Diaries of James Lees combined with extensive knowledge make this a dignified achievement. I much enjoyed Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie’s Love’s Civil War: Letters and Diaries 19411973, edited by Victoria Glendinning with Judith Robertson (Simon & Schuster, ?16.99). The contrast between Bowen’s uninhibited outpourings and Ritchie’s extremely circumspect comments is painfully instructive. Stefan Zweig’s Journey into the Past (Pushkin Press, ?7.99) reminds one of a quality too often missing from contemporary writing: tenderness. My absolute favourite is a reprint: Janet Malcolm’s Reading Chekhov. A Critical Journey (Granta, ?8.99) which comes prefaced with a memorable Chekhovian observation: ‘What torture it is to cut the nails on your right hand!’

A good year for fiction. Wolf Hall is being reserved for Christmas.

from here

Interviews with critical thinkers

2009-11-18T07:23:00.013+11:00

Gerard Genette's Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation provides a good perspective on the way in which the author interview functions to produce the biographical subject. He includes a quote from Roland Barthes. "For you, what is an interview?" Barthes was asked in April, 1979.

The interview is a practice that is fairly complex if not to analyse, then at the very least to judge. Generally speaking, i find interviews fairly trying and at one time i wanted to give them up..... And then i realised that my attitude was excessive: the interview is - to put it lightly - part of the social game that no one can evade, or, to put it more seriously, part of a collaborative intellectual venture between writers on the one hand and the media on the other hand. There are meshing gears that have to be accepted: from the moment one writes, one expects eventual publication, and from the moment one is published, one must accept what society asks of books and what it turns them into... Your question comes under the heading of a general study that is lacking of a subject i have always wanted to teach a course on: a vast panorama, long reflected on, of the practices of intellectual life in our day.

Paratexts, p.361.

And now for some interviews with critical thinkers:
Simone de Beauvoir
Michel Foucault
Judith Butler
Pierre Bourdieu
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Critics at work: interviews, 1993-2003
Jacques Derrida
Annamarie Jagose interviews Judith Halberstam
Gerard Genette (in French)
Roland Barthes, in The Language of Fashion.
Germaine Greer
Sigmund Freud
Julia Kristeva
Alain Badiou
Jacques Lacan

At home:
Justin Clemens on the 30th anniversary of Foucault's (PhD project) Madness and Civilisation at the ABC's Philosopher's Zone
- on another note: Justin on Alain Badiou as part of the Unimelb Key Thinkers series SlowTV from The Monthly

Producing the (preferably humanities) Academic

2009-11-15T16:47:00.027+11:00

Columbia University professor (male) seeks woman interested in common goals and companionship. Must have a Ph.D and be over thirty-five.
Physical appearance not important!

From The Mirror Has Two Faces

This is a list of texts which, in varying ways, produce representations of the academic and/or academic life. All contributions welcome! And many thanks to those who've already contributed.

Fiction:
Anita Brookner, A Start in Life (1980): Ruth's specialty is "Women in Balzac's Novels"; Providence (1981): Kitty teaches Benjamin Constant's Adolphe; Look At Me (1983) Frances Hilton works in the reference library of medical research institute; A Misalliance (1986): Blanche's thesis is on Madame du Stael; Lewis Percy (1989): Lewis's thesis is on "The Hero as Archetype in Nineteenth Century French Literature"; Fraud (1992) Anna's research is on "something to do with the Paris salons of the nineteenth century" (p.18); A Family Romance (1993) Jane lectures about fairytales; Undue Influence (1999): Martin is a former professor in European Literature at London University; in Leaving Home, Emma Roberts' thesis is on nineteenth-century French garden design.
non-Brookner: Helen Garner, The First Stone. Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird. David Leavitt, Martin Bauman. John Fowles, The Magus. Jincy Willet, The Writing Class. Donna Tartt, The Secret History. Michael Franzen, The Corrections. Zadie Smith, On Beauty. Tobias Hill, The Hidden. Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts. Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People is Wrong. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim. A.S. Byatt, The Game. David Williamson, Dead White Males. Justine Ettler, The River Ophelia. Andrew Masterson, The Death of the Author. Sue Woolfe, Leaning Towards Infinity. Christine Poulson, Murder is Academic: A Cambridge Mystery. Carol Shields, Larry's Party; Mary Swann. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, David Lodge. Robert Grudin, Book. Philip Roth, The Breast; The Professor of Desire. Richard Russo, Straight Man. James Hynes, The Lecturer's Tale; Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror. Jane Smiley, Moo. Jonathan Coe, House of Sleep. Lisa Alther, Kinflicks.

Film:
Little Miss Sunshine, Basic Instinct, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Shaun of the Dead, The Savages, Back to School, Youth Without Youth, Gross Misconduct, The Seven Intellectuals, Marie Curie, Smart People, On a day of ordinary violence, Mona Lisa Smile, The Decline of the American Empire, The Barbarian Invasions, Educating Rita, Accident, Desert Hearts, Storytelling, Legally Blonde 1 & 2, A Beautiful Mind, St Elmo's Fire, Loser, Petersen, The Mirror Has Two Faces, One True Thing, A Prairie Home Companion, Wit.

Adaptations:
J.M.Coetzee, Disgrace. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited. Straw Dogs / Gordon Williams, The Siege of Trencher's Farm. The Wonder Boys. A.S. Byatt, Possession. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, Phillip Roth, The Dying Animal / Elegy; The Human Stain. Brett Easton Ellis, Rules of Attraction. Art School Confidential, Iris. Elliot Perlman, Three Dollars.

TV:
Gossip Girl, Felicity, Beverly Hills 90210, Dawson's Creek, Queer as Folk.

Memoir:
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love. Simone du Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; The Prime of Life; Force of Circumstance; A Very Easy Death. Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: the political memoir of a feminist militant. James D. Watson, The Double Helix

Biography:
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.

Documentary:
Zizek!

In a sense all critical texts produce the academic by way of the critical response. However, some critical texts directly address the issue of the academic or intellectual cultures:
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus. A.D. Nuttall, Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination. C.P, Snow, The Two Cultures... Okay, there's a whole academic genre about the intellectual...

Then there's also:
Journalism / Political Correctness / Anti-Intellectualism.
Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted our Higher Education; The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art. Camille Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture. Christina Hoff-Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women have Betrayed Women. Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America. Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A, Silverglate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's Campuses. John M. Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities. Paul Berman, Debating P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses. Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past. The Editors of Lingua Franca, The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Russel Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals.

The World's Top 100 Universities

2009-10-11T08:10:00.002+11:00

The World's Top 100 Universities

New York

2009-09-30T17:53:00.002+10:00

I will be in New York from October 17 - 27, so if any academic researchers would like to meet up, please email petamayer@gmail.com

My Project - Recent Articulations

2009-09-27T10:07:00.018+10:00

Anita Brookner is a French Romantic art historian and a contemporary British novelist. In popular and critical worlds, Brookner has been stereotyped as boring, old-fashioned and unsexy. These criticisms allude to what i call the "nineteenth-century effect" of her fiction. My contention is that the interpretation of the cultural text of “Anita Brookner” hangs on the reading of the nineteenth-century effect.

In mainstream criticism, the reading of the nineteenth-century effect is indicative of the heterochronic regulation of Symbolic. Organised around the biographical author-subject, generic Brookner criticism reflects the way in which the historical status of the subject is produced through the heterosexual matrix of gender. I argue that in the biographical construction of "Anita Brookner" as an unmarried, childless, women's writer, the nineteenth-century effect is produced in the Symbolic position of mother - by way of the author's Jewishness. The heterochronic organisation of the oedipal narrative constructing the author-subject means that readings of the nineteenth-century effect as a signifier of Brookner’s personal and sexual failure have dominated criticism of Brookner’s novels. The production of the nineteenth-century effect reflects the simultaneous regulation of representational status (discursivity, intelligibility, aesthetic production) and historical status with the figuration of desire.

I advance a new intertextual reading strategy for the nineteenth-century effect which i call "performative Romanticism". The epistemological context for my reading is located in Brookner’s connections to nineteenth-century French Romanticism, Aestheticism and Decadence and in her readings of Stendhal, Baudelaire, the Goncourt Brothers, J-K Huysmans and Henry James. I take my methodological impetus from the queering of the nineteenth century and queer theories of performativity and “crossing”.

In her critical art history texts, Brookner explains how Romantic narratives of loss and longing manifest in a provocative historical representational strategy designed to challenge hegemonic ideologies and expose the presuppositions organising self-evident modes of thought and behaviour. Brookner’s studies of nineteenth-century representational practices implicitly document the discursive proliferation famously analysed by Foucault as characterising a period of time during which formerly disparate sexual acts, practices and desires became increasingly regulated through the modern categories of sexual identification. Tracing a similar phenomenon in her interpretation of nineteenth-century literature, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick substitutes a plot/character analysis of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” with a biographical, historical, lexical, rhetorical and narrative reading strategy. Effectively Sedgwick produces the nineteenth-century textual figure of the Queer as an effect of the rhetorical figure of preterition and the narrative of the secret. While formulated as a transgressive response to loss and longing, Romantic narrative strategies and rhetorical devices produce textual figures which became read in an historical context where behaviours were becoming formalised into identity categories of the homosexual and the heterosexual.

I recruit a cast of intertextual figures or “Romantic personae”, including the Military Man, the Analysand, the Queer, the Aesthete, the Dandy, the Flaneur and the Degenerate, to propel my reading of the nineteenth-century effect in five of Brookner's twenty-four novels. My contention is that the narrative forms which produce these Romantic persone in nineteenth century texts are reconstituted and performed in Brookner’s contemporary fiction. I examine ways in which Stendhalian hendiadys, Freudian repetition, Jamesian preterition, Baudelairean peripetia, Decadent syllepsis – in conjunction with nineteenth-century narrative devices - are refigured in Brookner’s A Misalliance (1986), A Friend from England (1987), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1999) and Falling Slowly (1998). My reading of Brookner sponsors narrative crossings from nineteenth-century to contemporary contexts which intervene in the heterochronic organisation of normative gender and oedipal narratives. Through an intertextual, transhistorical Symbolising practice, I demonstrate alternative possibilities for a discursive project which rebuts heterochronic fantasies of Symbolic mastery.

Hotel du Lac by the BBC

2009-09-22T08:05:00.001+10:00

LipstickThespians has uploaded a few snippets of the BBC adaptation of Hotel du Lac to youtube.

From the Courtauld

2009-09-17T16:33:00.003+10:00

Two snippets of text concerning Brookner from the Courtauld site.

In the first piece, Brookner reflects on the significance of the Courtauld.

If you scroll down the page, Andrew Graham-Dixon "vividly remembers" Brookner as a teacher, and in particular "her wise advice to pay attention to every last detail in a work of art - "because nothing is a mere coincidence"".

The Paris Review Interview

2009-09-17T16:31:00.001+10:00

You can download a *.pdf of Brookner's interview in the Paris Review.

Cancer Sun, Cancer Moon

2009-09-17T16:26:00.004+10:00

Brookner was born in London on July 16, 1928. This means she has Cancer Sun, Cancer Moon. I'll be back with my interpretation soon. It also makes Harrison Ford the celebrity whom most resembles AB. Which produces a working analogy between Indiana Jones and the Brooknerine.

Read Brookner's reviews in The Spectator

2009-08-29T16:50:00.005+10:00

There's something about the reviews AB writes - her ability to see through convention and delusion, combined with the way she crafts her observations - that makes them seem even more creative than her fiction. This might be because the length of the novels, the way in which they exemplify literary realism, and most of all their hidden subtexts, make them seem more significant as critical objects as opposed to merely just pleasurable reading. Generally Brookner's reviews are much more interesting that the text she's reviewing.

The Spectator seem to allow you read her current reviews here.

Figures du destin stendhalien

2009-08-23T07:40:00.004+10:00

Is that a Military Man? I need this book. In English.

Reading Williams

2009-06-29T06:51:00.001+10:00

Through the combination of both historical and contemporary discourses, the narration of the Brookner subject challenges the ideological framework of mainstream historicism organised by the premise that "we are subjects of our time". The trans-temporal constitution of the Brooknerine demonstrates how the periodising determinism of mainstream historicism implicitly produces the heterosexual subject as its central epistemological object. Consequently, the Brookner subject illuminates the absence of discursive tools for the interpretation of historical subjectivities who do not conform with normative contemporaneity.

Raymond Williams observes that a disadvantage of "epochal" analysis is its tendency to efface the internal dynamics of cultural and historical change. In Literature and Marxism, Williams identifies four temporal epistemologies that potentially co-exist within a given historical period: the dominant, the archaic, the residual and the emergent. He describes the “dominant” mode as the hegemonic culture; the “archaic” as that which is wholly recognised as an element of the past and can be observed, examined and strategically “revived”; the “residual” as something formed in the past but still effective in the present; and the “emergent” as an indication of the possibility of new meanings, values, practices and relationships. Complex interrelations mediate the movement between the dominant culture and other cultural formations, particularly to the degree to which these formations represent oppositional or alternative possibilities to the dominant culture. The perceived strength of each formation is partly determined by the way in which it is ideologically processed, or “incorporated”, by the dominant culture. Incorporation includes both the ideological appropriation or abjection of the interposing formation.

Williams claims that while the relevance of each formation is produced in its relation to the dominant (ie hegemonic) culture, at the same time each category represents a definitive epistemological mode, which is significant both independently and for its potential to reveal the ideological machinations of the dominant culture (122). Furthermore, he states that the ideological work of the dominant culture is "very notable in the case of versions of the literary tradition." (123) Through its relationship to the other cultural/temporal modalities, the dominant culture establishes its authority by "connecting and incorporating definitions of what literature now is and should be" (123). As Williams notes, the dominant culture reinforces its authority by attempting to control the signifying systems of other cultural formations. (125) Integral to this process is control over the epistemological production of temporal categories. In the contemporary literary marketplace, representations of the Brookner text as old-fashioned, outdated and anachronistic are illustrative of Brookner’s capacity to dramatise the conditions for historical status in the literary canon. In Chapter 1 I illustrate how the “dominant” culture of the contemporary literary canon is reflected in mainstream Brookner criticism. Through its abjection of the Brookner text as old-fashioned, outdated and anachronistic, mainstream criticism produces its own authority and relevance. The dominant culture appropriates certain modes of Romantic temporality such as the category of the contemporary, yet at the same time the abjection of the Brookner text is contingent on its reading of the nineteenth-century as “past”, outdated and anachronistic. It is however through this dynamic in which contemporary status is enacted, that the Brookner text illuminates the conditions for historical status.

The Brookner text can be strategically located to deconstruct the conditions for historical status within the dominant cultural formation because the multi-temporal subjectivisation of the Brooknerine dramatises the cultural process Williams describes. The discursive production of the Brooknerine through historical and contemporary discourses generates a context in which criticism either produces itself in the dominant position and therefore must reject recombinant temporal modalities; or conversely in which criticism embarks on a meta-historical analysis. In the first case, mainstream criticism produces a normative historical subject and a contemporary chronotope by simultaneously defining the Brooknerine as either “archaic” (a temporal anomaly) or “residual” ie old-fashioned, outdated or anachronistic. The second case engenders the conditions for a meta-historicism such as performative Romanticism. By simultaneously performing multiple temporal periods, the Brooknerine generates an historical interpretation that reflects on the way in which historical meaning is constructed. Through an intertextual analysis, Performative Romanticism operates to support the trans-historical discourses of the Brooknerine. Therefore, in critically producing the Brooknerine as a trans-historical subject, performative Romanticism problematises the significations which the dominant culture attribute to the archaic, the residual and the emergent.

Reading Foucault, Reading Sedgwick

2009-06-26T09:43:00.000+10:00

In the History of Sexuality (1978) Michel Foucault produces the nineteenth century as an historical period characterised by the proliferation of discourses of sexuality (36). Central to his theory is the contention that the nineteenth century witnesses the appearance of the homosexual as a "species". Whereas formerly a disparate array of homosexual acts and practices subsisted, "The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly as mysterious physiology" (43). Foucault maps a historical movement throughout the nineteenth century in which homosexual acts and behaviour became increasingly regulated and heterosexual and homosexual identities were newly registrated and enforced, primarily through the specification of homosexual identity. Effectively Foucault’s ground-breaking work produces the nineteenth century as a chronotope of homosexuality.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of “homosexual panic”- the homophobic regulation of homosocial relations between men- examines the narrative effects of the historical changes identified by Foucault. The increasing surveillance of sexual behaviour in medical and social-science discourses, and the impetus to measure, define, record, examine and document homosexual acts and practices, culminated in the taxonomic classification of heterosexuality and homosexuality. The result was to institutionalise and privilege heterosexuality through the prohibition and pathologisation of homosexuality. In Between Men (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Sedgwick’s term “homosexual panic” refers to the way in which this punitive and regulating historical change impacted on social relations and consequently how this change manifested in nineteenth-century narrative. Just as Foucault emphasises the nascent discursive construction of the homosexual personage, Sedgwick identifies the emergence of the “liminal presence” of the homosexual in narrative (200). Furthermore, Sedgwick argues that as the identity of the homosexual became more tightly calibrated, “the broader issues of endemic male homosexual panic was again up for grabs in a way that was newly redetached from character taxonomy and was more apt to be described narratively” (188).

In Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Sedgwick formulates an epistemology and methodology of nineteenth-century textuality which is organised partly by a subject taxonomy, for which the nineteenth-century persona of the bachelor is indicative, and partly by an historicising lexical and rhetorical narrative interpretation. Sedgwick identifies the generic anti-hero persona of the nineteenth-century bachelor through a number of character traits that vary in both narrative strength and sympathy. They include an anaesthesic disposition towards sexuality (188), a self-marginalising discourse, (189), a dissolutive relation to the romantic genre (189), feminisation through domesticity (189), specialisation through bohemia (189), physical timidity (189), introspection and forms of self-knowledge (189), metropolitanism (193), a class status signifying between the bourgeois and thebohemian (193), moral and psychological conflict (195) and aesthetic inclinations (195). Thus Sedgwick produces a queer nineteenth-century subject along multiple epistemological axes. The nineteenth-century queer subject taxonomy that she renders becomes extremely useful for my reading of the nineteenth-century effect in Brookner’s fiction. Sedgwick describes the nineteenth-century figure of the bachelor as both a response to compulsory sexual choice and as a figure which establishes a precedent for representing alternatives to compulsory heterosexuality (193).

In her reading of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (1905), Sedgwick allies the presence of an emergent male homosexual thematics to the novella’s thematics of absence, in particular the absence of speech (200). In “The Beast in the Jungle”, the main protagonists John Marcher and May Bartram reencounter each other at an English manor house, after meeting years previously in Italy. At their initial meeting, John Marcher had confided in May Bartram that he felt he was fated for something unknown. After re-establishing contact, a friendship develops between Marcher and Bartram, which is influenced by the knowledge of Marcher’s secret fate. Following Bartram’s death, Marcher travels around Asia. At the end of the story he returns to visit her gravesite.

Sedgwick reads the novella’s homosexual thematics of absence as a product of the relation between the organising trope of the secret (200) and the lexical and rhetorical signifiers for the epistemological tradition of the “erotic negative” (203). Her contention is that, to the extent that Marcher’s secret has content, the content is homosexual. Furthermore she equates the Jamesian denial that the secret has content, “the assertion that its content is precisely a lack” to the attribution of a compulsory content about heterosexuality. She states, “The supposedly “empty” meaning of Marcher’s unspeakable doom is thus necessarily, specifically heterosexual; it refers to the perfectly specific absence of a prescribed heterosexual desire” (202). Sedgwick ties the trope of the secret to the representational tradition for signifiying homosexual acts. Thus she contextualises the productive absence of the secret in the signifying history of male same-sex genitality. Subsequently, she situates the use of preterition in James in the fin-de-siecle historical context of the trials of Oscar Wilde, at which time preteritive terms were even more emphatically condensed with homosexual meaning. (203) Sedgwick’s production of a nineteenth-century chronotope of homosexuality through her reading of James, becomes instructive for my reading of the nineteenth-century effect in Brookner, particularly on account of the significant intertextuality between James and Brookner.

Sedgwick invokes the rhetorical figure of preterition to locate the signifying tradition of absence in narrative. She combines James’s “quasi-nominative, quasi-obliterative structure” (203) with an array of both implicit and explicit lexical pointers to underscore how “homosexual meaning becomes, to the degree it does become, legible”. Sedgwick begins by identifying the historical signifiers of homosexual acts in the non-medical Christian tradition: the unspeakable, the unmentionable, nefandam libidinem, “that sin which should be neither named nor committed”, “the detestable and abominable sin”, “things fearful to name”, “the obscene sound of the unbeseeming words”, “the love that dare not speak its name”. (202-3) She details “fuller” pointers to homosexual meaning, which include direct references to queerness and perversion in the story. The she lists the lexical pointers from James’s text with more associative connotations to the preteritive tradition. These include:
John Marcher’s “secret,” “his singularity” (366), “the thing she knew, which grew to be at last, with the consecration of the years, never mentioned between them save as ‘the real truth’ about him” (366), “the abyss” (375), “his queer consciousness” (378), “the great vagueness” (379), “the secret of the gods” (379), “what ignominy or what monstrosity” (379), “dreadful things… I couldn’t name” (381)… “such a cataclysm” (360), “the great affair” (360), “the catastrophe” (361), “his predicament” (364), “their real truth” (368), “his inevitable topic” (371), “all that they had thought, first and last” (372), “horrors” (382), something “more monstrous” than all the thinkable” (384)… I don’t focus it. I can’t name it. I only know I’m exposed” (372). (203)
Sedgwick’s reading of James’s nineteenth-century narrative produces a queer discursivity which becomes significant in my queering of Brookner’s narrative through her intertextual connection to James.

Intertextual references to James are pervasive in Brookner’s oeuvre, across both her genres of criticism and fiction. “In America they liked it because they thought it was Jamesian,” said Brookner on A Misalliance, “which I would not have dared to presume. Yet it is about a moral problem; so is the next one, which is coming out in autumn and is called A Friend from England” (Art of Fiction, 166). In Chapter 1 I contextualise the presence of James in Brookner’s interviews as part of my reading of the biographical construction of Brookner as a women’s writer. In critical discourse, Brookner’s authority on James is demonstrated in her preface to the 2001 Modern Library Classics edition of The Portrait of a Lady. Brookner’s novels are populated with both implicit and explicit Jamesian indicators. In A Misalliance (1986), the main protagonist Blanche Vernon invokes James to reference her inappropriate behaviour: “I might make an injudicious remark or start raving on about Henry James”, Blanche teases her ex-husband Bertie. In Falling Slowly (1998), sister-protagonists Miriam and Beatrice take Sunday afternoon walks past Henry James’s flat. “”George Eliot lived here,” Miriam would say. “And Henry James had a flat a little further along. He was quite poor.” “You can see how rich George Eliot must have been.” Beatrice would reply vaguely.”” (FS, 163). Following Beatrice’s death, Miriam’s afternoons are spent reading James.
Already she had got through What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age, and was about to start on The Tragic Muse. She marvelled that Henry James knew so much about women and children, yet had remained a bachelor, and by all accounts a man of the greatest integrity. She liked that about him, that and his reputation for modesty. He had deferred to worldly friends, as if he were not more worldly than any of them. There was nothing cheap about Henry James (FS, 189).
I contextualise Brookner’s Jamesianism in the epistemological and methodological framework established by Sedgwick. Therefore I mobilise Sedgwick’s chronotopic production of the nineteenth-century to inform my reading of the nineteenth-century effect in Brookner. I use her taxonomy of the nineteenth-century subject to read axes of the Romantic personae in Brookner’s fiction. I take Sedgwick’s queer production of nineteenth-century Jamesian discursivity to intertextual Jamesian narrative practice.

antiTHESIS Symposium Friday July 10th

2009-06-25T10:01:00.000+10:00

Reading Butler

2009-06-18T08:45:00.001+10:00

In the canonical Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler privileged behaviour as the mechanism through which the performance of subjectivity was executed. The significance of behaviour as a key epistemological object in the constitution of subjectivity- in both Brookner and Butler- is a foundational pillar in my theory of performative Romanticism. In Gender Trouble, Butler identified "acts, gestures and desire" (GT, 136), "acts, gestures, enactments" (GT, 136) and "acts, gestures, articulated and enacted desires" (GT, 136) as the sites through which the epistemological subject was constituted. Butler argued that the historical subject was gendered through a "stylised repetition of acts" (GT, 140) which produced the illusion of a core sex identity. Maintaining that gender was "an identity tenuously constituted in time" (GT, 140) and a "constituted social temporality" (GT, 140), Butler effectively demonstrated that gender was the condition for intelligibility as an historical subject. Furthermore, because gender precipitated entry into the symbolic via the heterosexual matrix, she maintained that in fact heterosexuality effectively operated as the condition for intelligibility, discursivity and status as a historical subject. At the same time, Butler identified some ways in which the subject could resist and challenge overdetermination by the gender symbolic. The contingency of the gender performance meant that potentially subversive acts of “resignification” and “parodic displacement” could destabilise the heterosexual matrix by exposing the ideological mechanisms on which it was dependent.

Performative Romanticism locates the Brooknerine in the context of transgressive resignification that is critically produced in Butler’s work. Constructed across historical and intertexual discourses, the Brooknerine is constitutively a resignifying subject who subverts a normative gender performance in multiple ways. In each case, a queering of the Brookner text is produced. Firstly, as a contemporary subject who also performs Romantic behaviour, the Brooknerine is constituted via a trans-historical social temporality. Insofar as the performance of gender registers the historical subject in the symbolic, then the Brooknerine’s temporal crossings disavow the historical (unilateral) production of gender. Through the diachronic performance of both nineteenth-century and contemporary discourses, the Brooknerine resists the way in which the gendered historical subject is constituted as through a synchronic temporal performance. Therefore the trans-historical performance of the Brooknerine confounds attempts to register gender as historicity and exposes heterosexuality as the condition for historical status as a subject. The trans-historical performance of the Brooknerine is a queer performance in that it resists registration as a historical subject through the heterosexual matrix of gender.

Second, the Romantic behaviour performed by the Brooknerine for the most part becomes discursive in intertexts by or about male subjects. The historical subjects of Brookner’s critical oeuvre are mostly high-status male artists and Brooknerines are mostly low-status female subjects. Therefore the trans-gender performance of the Brooknerine constitutively resists normative gender registration. The degree to which the Romantic behaviour of the Brooknerine has gone undetected in critical discourse reflects the way in which gender organises interpretation. Thus the trans-historical, intertextual Brooknerine operates as an index of the relationship between gender and status in the cultural field. In this case, the queering of the Brookner text is accomplished as a result of the Brooknerines simultaneous performance of historically male and female gendered discourses.

Third, the temporal crossings of the Brooknerine reject determination by a chronological teleology. In the domestic fiction, the family is narratively organised by a generational, chronological teleology. “The solitary woman has a much longer life simply because she outlives the family”, Brookner told Hermione Lee, underscoring the way in which the Brooknerine resists confinement to a generational chronos. This resistance manifests both in historical and familial modes. Firstly, the trans-historical performance of the Brooknerine defies the progressive teleology of history that is regulated and enforced in the narrative of generation. Second, in my readings of A Friend from England and A Misalliance in Chapters 2 and 3, I illuminate the inability of generational appellations, eg “father” and “son”, to fix Brooknerines in symbolic positions in the domestic fiction. Therefore, the trans-generational performance of the Brooknerine initiates a queering of the family.

Nineteenth-century epistemologies in Falling Slowly (1998)

2009-06-12T09:34:00.008+10:00

Falling Slowly retrospectively narrates the lives of two sister protagonists, Miriam and Beatrice Sharpe, following Beatrice’s relatively premature death. The identities of both sisters are represented through their peripheral involvement in the arts and their failed relationship to heterosexual indicators. Miriam, a divorced literary translator and reader of George Gissing and Henry James, is a self-described realist who would urge her sister to visit the National Gallery for an uplifting experience. Beatrice was a piano accompanist and her increasing preference for popular romance novels and women's magazines were partly held by Miriam to account for her status as an "unclaimed" woman. The decline of Beatrice's health accompanies the news, delivered by her agent Simon Haggard, that she has been made redundant. At the same time, divorced Miriam begins an affair with the married Simon. As Miriam's obsession escalates and Beatrice's health degenerates, it becomes less clear which of the sisters is the realist. By the end of the novel the reader is returned to the narrative context of the opening chapter.

In Romanticism and Its Discontents, Brookner discusses the concept of Romantic spectatorship.

It should be remembered that the Romantic painter has designs on the spectator. He is out to remove the spectator from his normal or appropriate perceptual field, and in doing so infect him with his own personal doubts… In front of a true Romantic picture the spectator will be forced constantly to adjust his stance, stepping backward or forward or sideways, disconcerted, discomfited, sometimes physically uneasy. These effects will be achieved by the compulsion of the artist working through his chosen subject. (RD, 6).

Romantic spectatorship traverses discourses of aesthetic production and consumption. In this passage, Brookner illuminates firstly how epistemological absence - the loss of knowledge - is dramatised in Romantic aesthetic production and consumption. Second, therefore, she identifies how the Romantic aesthetic experience is characterised by unstable reading positions. Integral to the shifting perceptual field is the figure of reversal. In Falling Slowly, a title which similarly evokes the figure of reversal, Beatrice undergoes a devastating aesthetic experience (popularly known as “The Stendhal Syndrome”) at the Tate Gallery. As witness to J.M.W. Turner’s “A Ship between Two Headlands”, she experiences a tragic loss of authority and is overwhelmed by the awareness of it as a true reflection of her reality. The experience licenses a metonymical shift whereby Beatrice becomes identified as “haggard”, a signifier which also references Miriam’s lover Simon Haggard. The result is to generate an erotic effect between the sisters, emblematic of Sarah Innes Brown’s interpretation of the lesbian sister incest effect in nineteenth-century narratives.

I take the intertextual figure of The Degenerate as the narrative mechanism for my interpretation of Falling Slowly. A temporal figure, The Degenerate performs the reversal evoked in the novel’s title. The figure of reversal is narrated throughout the genre of Decadence and across a number of nineteenth-century texts in representations of gender, family and consumerism. I take Barbara Spackman’s characterisation of woman as “the primary agent of degeneration” as indicative of how degeneration was narrated as a performance of female behaviour. In J-K Huysmans’s Against Nature the figure of the degenerate is performed in the effeminised, neurotic, non-reproductive and highly asetheticised persona of the Duc d’Essentes. George Gissing’s The Odd Women problematised the situation of women in the context of the private and public challenges of fin-de-siecle industrial modernity. H. Rider Haggard was a novelist of the “male romance” adventure narrative, a popular genre considered indicative of the negative effects of increasing commercialisation in the literary field. Haggard’s 1893 novella, “Beatrice” narrated “the tragic story” of “an undisciplined but beautiful character”. I mobilise the figure of the degenerate to interpret of the performance of femininity in Falling Slowly; the way the novel narrates the effects of aesthetic production and consumption and the relationship between Romantic chronotopic production and contemporary status indicators.

* note to self: the notes I took in the spiral books are quite good.

Nineteenth-century epistemologies in Undue Influence (1999)

2009-06-11T05:53:00.004+10:00

Claire Pitt, the thirty-two year old (?) homodiegetic narrator of Undue Influence (1999) is a speculative character. Claire observes the world at a distance and uses her imagination to create scenarios about people she encounters while out walking, at the Gower St bookshop where she works or in her secretive sex life in the cathedral cities of France. Following the death of her mother, Claire attempts to immerse herself in a work project involving the editing of a manuscript entitled "Walks with Myself", authored by the father of her spinster employers. She is interrupted by the appearance of Martin Gibson, a former lecturer in the Romance Languages at London University, in search of a volume of Heine's poems. Following the death of Martin's wife, he and Claire have a brief affair.

In Romanticism and its Discontents, Brookner represents Charles Baudelaire's "The Painter of Modern Life" as "Baudelaire's most memorable utterance on the business of creative imagination" (RD, 73). She states, "This is nominally a report on the work of Constantin Guys, referred to throughout as M.G." (RD, 73). In Undue Influence, on the two occasions when Martin Gibson signs his name he identifies himself with the signifier "M.G." First, he leaves a note for Claire and her friend Wiggy on the typewriter at the bookshop: "We should be very happy to see you both on Saturday, if convenient. Kind regards. M.G. Please forgive note" (). Later he sends a card to Claire informing her of his imminent return to London: "I will be with you on the 15th. Regards M.G." (UI, 183)

I read the signifier "M.G." as an intertextual effect which stages the figure of The Flaneur. I take the figure of the nineteenth-century Flaneur as the organising device for reading epistemologies of the Romantic Imagination and walking in Undue Influence. By calibrating my interpretation around the narrator's Imagination and her walking as a Romantic performance, I contest the hetero-chronic reading of the text around the heterosexual romance plot. Instead, I mobilise the narrative of poetic influence that Harold Bloom proposed in The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom narrated a six-stage process through which the young poet-Ephebe establishes his creative ascendancy in a retroactive reading of the precursor Master poet. I cast Claire as the Ephebe and Martin as the precursor poet and in so doing demonstrate how the intertextual figure enables new readings of both historical and contemporary texts.

Nineteenth-century epistemologies in Brief Lives (1990)

2009-06-10T15:21:00.005+10:00

Fay Dodworth (“faded worth”) the self-described “dull” and “boring” narrator of Brief Lives (1990) recounts in some detail the experiences of her life and those of her significant others. The star of her narrative is the “striking” Julia Morton, a former diseuse and cultural icon, in whose “thraldom” Fay is held. Julia’s obituary in The Times precipitates Fay’s retrospective narrative. She reflects on her childhood, her early career as a singer, her marriage, meeting Julia (the wife of her husband’s employer), their holidays in Nice, the death of her husband, her affair with Julia’s husband and his death and her relationship with Julia and their small circle of acquaintances. Like A Friend from England and A Misalliance, Brief Lives was not a popular text. Independently represented as “depressing” (Lehmann-Haupt), “virtually plotless” (Duiguid) and “absurd” (Bjorkman), Cheryl Malcolm Alexander surmised a range of “wholly inconsequential and everyday scenes” (118). She maintained that “understatement and the supplying of seemingly inconsequential information are common features of Brookner’s writing” (116).

In the seventeenth century, polymath antiquarian John Aubrey authored another text which goes by the name “Brief Lives”. Aubrey’s haphazard manuscripts- described as “paper museums… cabinets of curiosities” by Aubrey scholar Kate Bennett, are also notorious for their use of “inconsequential” detail (Kite). In fin-de-siecle France, Symbolist poet Marcel Schwob created “Imaginary Lives”, fictional biographies of historical figures, in which he praised Aubrey’s use of detail to reveal the general in the particular. Like Huysmans and Baudelaire, key subjects of Brookner’s Romantic art criticism, Schwob participated in the fin-de-siecle Aestheticist movement. Within discourses of Aestheticism, the category of detail signified in three ways. Firstly, the detail gained significance as a narrative effect which represented an increasing emphasis on the material object with the growth of industrialisation. In The Genius of the Future (1971), Brookner applauded the “documentary approach” of the Goncourt Brothers in La Maison d’un Artiste (1881) for attributing value to textual fragments such as dressmakers’ bills, menus and bulletins on the state of the King’s health (135). Likewise, Brookner emphasised the “endless descriptions” of Huysmans’ Against Nature (1884) and its “cataloguing approach” as symptomatic of a progressive and confrontational nineteenth-century narrative form that reflected the contested status of the object in the newly developing market economy (RD, 167). Second, the detail referred to a temporal condition, the aestheticised phenomenology of the moment. Walter Pater described the “awful brevity” of sensorial impressions which “gather all… into one desperate effort to see and touch” (Lane, 1994, 33). While Baudelaire evoked “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” to reference the modern experience. In the late nineteenth-century, brevity marked the temporality of the detail. Third, the detail was a signifier of the nineteenth-century persona of the dandy. In “Dandyism and Fashion”, Roland Barthes locates “the detail”, which he calls the “”next-to-nothing”, the je ne sais quot, the manner etc” as an index of the social, cultural and material status of the dandy (Barthes, 2006, 66).

I take the Romantic persona of The Dandy as the intertextual figure for my reading of Brief Lives. In Treatise of an Elegant Life (), Balzac declared “Talk, walk, eat or dress and I will tell you who you are”. I use these vectors of dandyism as the mechanism to produce an epistemology of dandyism in Brief Lives. My contention is that by assembling “the seemingly inconsequential detail” of Brookner’s Brief Lives along the performative modes of walk, talk, eat and dress, the objects of a dandy narrative emerge. Thus my epistemology of Brookner’s text is organised around Julia’s toilette and wardrobe (dress), Fay’s first-person narrative and Julia’s “in house” performances (talk), Fay’s flanerie like movement through the streets of London (walk) and the delicate recipes Fay develops (eat). In Clara Tuite’s reading of “the first dandy biography”, she observed that, based around the generic contours of glamour, ruination and ephemeral endurance, the rise-and-fall narrative was to write the figure of the dandy. Thus I use the rise-and-fall narrative to propel the vectors of dandyism in the novel. As part of my reading, I construct a visual narrative of Brookner’s novel to function as “inserts” or as a performative homage to the “paper museum” of Aubrey’s Brief Lives.

Nineteenth-century epistemologies in A Misalliance (1986)

2009-06-10T08:41:00.005+10:00

Blanche Vernon, the chic, recently divorced, main protagonist of A Misalliance (1986), cultivates “elaborate stratagems” of personal ritual and discipline “to keep panic at bay”. Blanche occupies herself with grooming, culinary pleasures, volunteer work at the local hospital and visits to the National Gallery, where she becomes obsessed with the images of the nymphs of Renaissance painting in the Gallery’s Italian Rooms. Reading her experience through a pagan/Christian dichotomy, Blanche seeks to correct her “faulty education” (M, 9) through instruction by the nymphs on issues of “love and pleasure”. While at the hospital, Blanche encounters “spectacular, vivid, obtrusive” (M, 38) Sally Beamish and her mute stepdaughter, Elinor. Deciding that Sally “was, in fact, a sort of a nymph” (M, 58) Blanche transfers her fascination with the nymphs onto Sally herself. As their involvement deepens, Blanche assists Sally financially until finally her demands become unsustainable.
Like many Brooknerines, Blanche is a reader of Henry James. “I might make an injudicious remark or start raving on about Henry James”, she teases her ex-husband Bertie, contextualising James’s signification as a mode of transgressive discourse (M, 73). The Jamesian effect in A Misalliance operates in different yet complementary ways. Firstly, I read Blanche’s meticulous construction of a public and aestheticised persona, in contrast to her innermost fears, through the Jamesian narrative of the secret. Second, James was one of a collection of fin-de-sieclewriters, including Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, who contributed to the narrative construction of nineteenth-century Aesthete. Blanche’s witty discourse, her sensual and aesthetic proclivities, her will to live “life as art”, her investment in Hellenistic discourses and the use-value she attributes to capital are all behaviours that find epistemological significance in the figure of the nineteenth-century Aesthete. I engage “The Aesthete” as the intertextual figure for my reading of A Misalliance. My reading of Blanche’s behaviour as a nineteenth-century aestheticised performance initiates a queering of the relationship between Blanche and Sally.
Family / generation

Nineteenth-century epistemologies in A Friend from England (1987)

2009-06-09T19:18:00.010+10:00

Rachel Kennedy, the hydrophobic, thirty-two year old narrator of A Friend from England (1987) is a professional, single woman; an urbane "feminist" (FE, 57) whose outwardly ascetic lifestyle disguises "extensive sexual experience" (FE, 52). When Rachel inherits her father's former accountant, Oscar Livingstone, to administer the finances of the West London bookstore where she lives and works, a social relationship develops between the narrator and the Livingstone family. For Rachel, the Livingstones represent a "Victorian" (FE, 38) fantasy, centred around the behaviour of twenty-eight year old Heather Livingstone (FE, 45). However, Rachel's fantasy starts to unravel when Heather becomes engaged to Michael Sandberg. In telling her story, Rachel states that, "Looking back much later I came to see it as something from the pages of a nineteenth-century novel" () Her retrospective narrative traces increasingly unpredictable behaviour in response to a series of decisions Heather makes in her private (ie sexual) life.

My contention is that Rachel's behaviour, and her narrative construction of Michael Sandberg, can be best illuminated through discourses of Romantic performativity. Rachel's militant attitude, her hyperbolic responses and her sense of loss at the novel's denouement, are evocative of the behaviour that Brookner underscores in her narrative on Stendhal in The Genius of the Future (1971). In this text, Brookner constructs Stendhal as a subject transformed by his experience as a soldier in Napoleon's army. Stendhal’s militancy, his “passion as energy” and his knowledge of a sense of loss are key epistemological behaviours in his formation as a Romantic subject. Therefore, I take the Military Man as the epistemological figure to narrate the intertextual relationship between the nineteenth-century Stendhalian subject and the contemporary Brooknerine. My reading of Rachel’s behaviour as a Stendhalian performance underwrites the emergence of a contemporary Romantic narrative of her desire for Heather.

Two other figures I mobilise are The Analysand and The Queer. Rachel’s hydrophobia marks her as “symptomising” subject. She has nightmares about drowning, a horror of swimming, avoids leaving the house when it’s raining. Yet she finds herself in a bar named “The Titanic” –where she exposes Michael’s homosexual “secret” – and running a mission to Venice, with the aim of “arresting” Heather and bringing her back home. In Dora or “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” Freud claimed that “a symptom signifies a sexual situation” (D, 80). He also stated that “”wet” was connected with… the group of ideas relating to sexual temptation… a kind of getting wet involved in sexual intercourse” (D, 128). Therefore I mobilise the figure of The Analysand to read Rachel’s hydrophobia through the epistemology that Freud constructs in his case study of Dora. Freud’s (albeit belated) recognition of “Dora’s deep-rooted love for Frau K” (D, n146) constructs a representational matrix which enables my reading of Rachel’s desire for Heather. I maintain that Rachel’s desire for Heather is performed through the epistemological production of the fin-de-siecle Analysand.

Rachel is immediately suspicious of Heather’s fiancée Michael Sandberg, when she meets him at a family gathering to celebrate their sudden engagement. Her representations of him as a “liar” (FE, 42), “fearfully animated” (FE, 43), “opaque” (FE, 37) and “unfocussed” (FE, 45) effect the behaviour of a man with a secret. In addition, Rachel’s description of Michael as “not the sort of man to rouse a woman from the slumbers of virginity” (FE, 51); “Michael was a son, he would never be a husband” (FE, 65), in contesting his heterosexuality, implicate Michael’s forthcoming marriage in the operation of the secret. When Rachel apprehends Michael wearing make-up at the “peculiar wine bar” named The Titanic, his “secret” is exposed (FE, 108). In her reading of “the secret” in Henry James’s novella “The Beast in the Jungle” (1905) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick constructs an epistemology of queer behaviour around the trope of preterition. I take the nineteenth-century figure of The Queer to read Rachel’s retrospective narrative as producing Michael’s homosexuality through the Jamesian narrative of the secret. My reading of nineteenth-century behaviour in A Friend from England underscores four epistemologies of homoerotic desire in the novel: Rachel’s Romantic desire for Heather performed through a Stendhalian narrative, Rachel’s desire for Heather read through a Freudian representational matrix, Rachel’s representation of Michael’s homosexuality rendered through the Jamesian narrative of the secret and the spectre of lesbian desire narrated through contemporary representational practices.

Represented as ““one of Brookner’s most painful novels” (Fisher-Wirth), A Friend from England was not a popular success. Criticisms ranged from a widespread dislike of the “monstrous, pathological” character of Rachel, to the suggestion of a “structural fault” in Brookner’s narrative and reflect the way in which Brookner transgresses normative expectations. In the Times Literary Supplement David Plante remarked on a deep sense of “unreality” pervading the narrative: “When one reads of Heather tucking a rug around Rachel’s legs in the car, one wonders if a young woman of twenty-seven would do that for another young woman, hardly older, even in England.” Plante’s comment demonstrates how age is used as a discursive vehicle for the regulation of gender normativity in Brookner criticism. At the same time, his response inversely represents the two main female protagonists in a lesbian scene.

Lynn Veach Sadler’s representation of Rachel as “a female version… of John Marcher in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”” is, as Patricia Juliana Smith phrases it “far from trivial”. Smith classifies Brookner as emblematic of the category of “lesbian panic”, her reworking of Sedgwick’s seminal theory of “homosexual panic”. Smith maintains that Rachel’s repressed lesbianism, combined with her failure to acknowledge or name male homosexuality in the text, are a homophobic effect of Brookner’s inculpation of in anachronistic and outdated nineteenth-century narrative codes and ideologies. I argue that in advocating the representation of a contemporary lesbian identity, Smith reinforces the historical conditions for discursive status that Annamarie Jagose maintained were simultaneously responsible for lesbian invisibility. Smith’s resistance to a performative reading of nineteenth-century epistemologies, elides the productive function of criticism. I read Rachel’s construction of Michael, via James and in conjunction with other nineteenth-century epistemologies in the novel, as a narrative performance invested in the historicizing representations of homoerotic desire.
[Non-hierarchical / non-generational . family]

Anita Brookner, the Nineteenth-Century Effect and Performative Romanticism

2009-05-27T06:02:00.023+10:00

The central proposition of my thesis is that nineteenth-century behaviour, indicated in the narratives of male Romantic aesthetes, is performed through the contemporary female subjects of Brookner’s fiction. In Brookner’s twenty-four novels, implicit and explicit references to nineteenth-century texts, contexts and subjects produce a “nineteenth-century effect”. My contention is that the interpretation of Brookner's fiction hangs on the question of how to read this nineteenth-century effect. In response to this conundrum, I propose an intertextual reading strategy called “performative Romanticism”. In Chapter One I delineate how the epistemological production of the Brookner text through the unidentified misreading of the nineteenth-century effect in mainstream criticism has resulted in the devaluation of the Brookner text and consequently has undermined Brookner’s status in the cultural field. Conversely, in Chapters Two – Six, I demonstrate the productive application of performative Romanticism in my interpretation of five of Brookner’s novels. My tripartite theory of performative Romanticism initiates a new epistemological and methodological reading of the Brookner text. Firstly, I identify nineteenth-century intertextual sources in Brookner’s novels. Second, I generate a nineteenth-century epistemological formation from my reading of the nineteenth-century intertext. I engage a cast of Romantic personae to represent modes of Romantic behaviour. Finally, I use critical methodologies of nineteenth-century texts to read the performance of Romantic behaviour as it emerges in Brookner's contemporary novels. Performative Romanticism effects a queering of the Brookner oeuvre and provides a new reading of the family saga genre.

As a Romantic art historian, Brookner has made a significant contribution to the discursive construction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the fin-de-siecle period. In The Genius of the Future (1971) and Romanticism and its Discontents (2000), Brookner narrates the evolution of Romanticism through her biographical narratives of Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, the Goncourt Brothers, J-K Huysmans, Gros, Alfred de Musset, Delacroix and Ingres. In addition, in her interviews and in numerous reviews for publications including the Times Literary Supplement and The Spectator, Brookner represents other nineteenth-century and fin-de-siecle subjects including Henry James, Freud and Proust. Brookner's historical biographies of Romantic artists constitute constructions of nineteenth-century male subjects and render a chronotope of the nineteenth-century. Thus Brookner produces an epistemology and methodology of Romantic texts, contexts and subjects in her critical oeuvre. The immense volume of Brookner's critical output establishes a vast archive of material which historicise Romantic behavioural modes and representational practices.

According to Brookner, Romanticism is about "modes of behaviour" (Publishers Weekly, September 1985); "Romanticism is about forms of behaviour; it is therefore recognisable" (RD, 1); "Behaviour is most important" (MacGregor). In Brookner's critical oeuvre, and in the life and work of Brookner's critical subjects, Romanticism is narrated through modes of behaviour. In underscoring behaviour as integral to a Romantic epistemology, Brookner represents the Romantic subject as a performative subject. Contextualising Romanticism as an historical response to the loss of God and of Reason, Brookner told Shusha Guppy that, “It opened up the floodgates to self-examination”.

“Where does it all come from?” they asked. And it was discovered that once you no longer were constrained to be good, either by Christianity or by a secular philosophy which for a time was even stronger, namely the Enlightenment, there was no limit to bad behaviour. But also to inventive, creative, autobiographical behaviour. (Art of Fiction, 155)

Brookner’s emphasis on the behaviour of the subject underscores the significance of the Romantic moi; the performative aspects of Romanticism centred in the subject. Produced through self-examination, and dramatised, in conjunction with Imagination, the performative Romantic subject was representative of a new, contemporary experience. In Racine et Shakespeare (1823) Stendhal’s assertion: “I want my language to suit the children of the Revolution” effectively demanded a complementary relationship between historical context, subject and text (representational practice, aesthetics or discursivity). Brookner claimed this was “remarkable” insofar as it was not primarily for literary purposes, but was necessitated for historical, social and moral reasons (GF, 47-8). Subsequently in "The Painter of Modern Life" (1863), Baudelaire produced the category of the contemporary through a cast of subjects he rendered as representative of a specifically modern experience, le beau ideal moderne. Baudelaire's Romantic personae included The Artist, The Child, The Convalescent, The Military Man, The Dandy, The Flaneur, and Woman.

In Chapters Two-Six, my readings of Brookner's novels are organised around cast of Romantic subjects whom I suggest are representative of the modes of Romantic behaviour that I identify in the text. In Chapter Two my reading of A Friend from England (1987) mobilises the figures of The Military Man, The Analysand and The Queer. I interpret the text through readings of Stendhal, Freud and Henry James. In Chapter Three, The Aesthete is the vehicle for my interpretation of A Misalliance (1986), which I read through the narratives of James, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. In Chapter Four on Brief Lives (1990) I examine the intertextual relationship between Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Brookner’s Brief Lives and the Imaginary Lives of nineteenth-century Aesthete, Marcel Schwob. I take the intertextual emphasis on narrative detail to propel my reading of the text through the figure of The Dandy. My Chapter Five on Undue Influence (1999) engages the figure of The Flaneur from Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” to read the narrator’s emphasis on Imagination and walking. I use Harold Bloom’s narrative structure from The Anxiety of Influence to construct an alternative methodology for reading against the presumption of heterosexuality. Finally in Chapter Six, I read Falling Slowly (1998) through the figure of The Degenerate. I draw on narratives from Rider Haggard and George Gissing.

In the canonical Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler privileged behaviour as the mechanism through which the performance of subjectivity was executed. Butler identified "acts, gestures and desire" (GT, 136), "acts, gestures, enactments" (GT, 136) and "acts, gestures, articulated and enacted desires" (GT, 136) as the sites through which the epistemological subject was constituted. Butler argued that the historical subject was gendered through a "stylised repetition of acts" (GT, 140) which produced the illusion of a core sex identity. Maintaining that gender was "an identity tenuously constituted in time" (GT, 140) and a "constituted social temporality" (GT, 140), Butler effectively demonstrated that gender was the condition for intelligibility as an historical subject. Furthermore, because gender precipitated entry into the symbolic via the heterosexual matrix, she maintained that heterosexuality effectively operated as the condition for intelligibility, discursivity and status as a historical subject. At the same time, Butler identified some transgressive possibilities for the performative subject. The contingency of the gender performance meant that potentially subversive acts of “resignification” and “parodic displacement” could destabilise the heterosexual matrix by exposing the ideological mechanisms on which it was dependent.

My contention that Brookner’s (predominantly female) contemporary subjects perform the Romantic behaviour of (predominantly male) nineteenth-century artists constitutes a trans-historical mode of resignfying the transgressive potential of the performative subject. Crossing historical period, gender and genre, Brookner’s subjects complicate normative readings of gender, sexuality and family. Through the lens of performative Romanticism, “Brooknerines” challenge the historicist premise (effectively a legacy of Romanticism as indicated in the narratives of Stendhal and Baudelaire) that “we are subjects of our time.” In doing so, performative Romanticism problematises mainstream readings of the relationship between subject, context and aesthetic production and the function of reading and interpretation. This intervenes in the dominant stereotype of Brookner and therefore has widespread repercussions for Brookner’s status in the cultural field.

The spectre of Romanticism as a contemporary phenomenon, temporally removed from the historical conditions under which it was initially constituted, gains credibility in the context of critical comments made by Brookner. In a 1987 interview, Shusha Guppy asked Brookner to comment on Isiah Berlin's contention that "all the problems of our age can be traced back to Romanticism" (Art of Fiction, 156). "He is absolutely right", the novelist replied, "It was hearing him lecture on the subject that impressed me so much as made me decide to take it up and teach it myself". On the legacy of Romanticism, Brookner suggested that "the traces are still perceptible today, even though the context has been lost" (RD, 20). And in interview with John Haffenden, she hinted that "my personages could be reactivated, if the times were right: I hope so" (Haffenden, 74). Through the new production of a nineteenth-century chronotope, 1990s queer theory enabled the conditions to re-read Brookner. In Reading fin-de-siecle Fictions (1996) Lyn Pykett celebrated a resurgence of critical interest in nineteenth-century narratives. She stated,

The “new” fin de siecle is, to a great extent, the product of new critical and theoretical perspectives and/or current political and ideological concerns... [which] have redefined the relationships between literary and non-literary texts, and between texts and their contexts which had become established in literary studies as traditionally conceived. (3-4)

Pykett gestured to a wealth of narratives across historicist, post-structuralist, feminist and queer critical practice which produced new epistemological formations of nineteenth-century chronotopes and subjects and new methodological strategies for the interpretation of nineteenth-century texts.

In Victorian Sexual Dissidence (1999) Richard Dellamora commemorated a similar phenomenon, declaring that “The “gaying” of critical studies of the late Victorian period has been underway now for more than a decade”. Contemporaneous with Butler’s Gender Trouble, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991) transformed literary criticism by introducing alternative methodological techniques for the reading of nineteenth-century texts. Sedgwick argued that “homosexual panic”- the homophobic regulation of homosocial relations between men- was reflected in key nineteenth-century narratives. Her readings of Oscar Wilde, James and Proust produced a new epistemology of nineteenth-century narrative effects. In the seminal chapter “The Beast in the Closet”, Sedgwick maintained that Henry James’s 1905 novella “The Beast in the Jungle” exemplified the structural and narrative manifestation of homosexual panic. The rich intertextual relationship between Henry James and Brookner implied new possibilities for Brookner interpretation existed in Sedgwick’s groundbreaking critical strategies.

Intertextual references to James are pervasive in Brookner’s oeuvre. In addition to implicit allusion, Brookner’s novels are populated with explicit Jamesian indicators, In A Misalliance (1986), the main protagonist Blanche Vernon invoked James to reference her inappropriate behaviour: “I might make an injudicious remark or start raving on about Henry James”, Blanche threatened her ex-husband Bertie. “I think we have heard quite enough about Henry James”, he replied (M, 73). In Chapter Three, I use Sedgwick’s analysis of the Jamesian secret to interpret Blanche’s fearful behaviour. I mobilise the figure of the nineteenth-century Aesthete, as it is narrated by James in texts such as The Author of Beltraffio, to read the novel’s Pagan/Christian dichotomy, the danger attributed to art and its emphasis on the senses. When read in conjunction with the novel’s implosion of life and art, as manifested in the way that the Blanche transfers her fascination for the nymphs of Renaissance art to the person of her new acquaintance Sally Beamish, a queering of the Brookner text results. In Falling Slowly (1998), sister-protagonists Miriam and Beatrice take Sunday afternoon walks past Henry James’s flat. “”George Eliot lived here,” Miriam would say. “And Henry James had a flat a little further along. He was quite poor.” “You can see how rich George Eliot must have been.” Beatrice would reply vaguely.”” (FS, 163). Following Beatrice’s death, Miriam’s afternoons are spent reading James. “Already she had got through What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age, and was about to start on The Tragic Muse. She marvelled that Henry James knew so much about women and children, yet had remained a bachelor, and by all accounts a man of the greatest integrity. She liked that about him, that and his reputation for modesty. He had deferred to worldly friends, as if he were not more worldly than any of them. There was nothing cheap about Henry James” (FS, 189). In the final chapter of my thesis, my reading of Falling Slowly further elaborates the application of fin-de-siecle textual criticism to read the text through the figure of the Degenerate.

Within critical discourse, Brookner’s authority on James is demonstrated in her preface to the 2001 of the Modern Library Classics edition of The Portrait of a Lady. By extension, Brookner’s regard for James is reflected throughout her interviews. In 1985 she stated, singling out Dickens and James: “I’m quite content to claim these two great men as my mentors” (Publishers Weekly, 67). Following the publication of A Misalliance in 1986, she told Guppy, “In American they liked it because they thought it was Jamesian, which I would not have dared to presume. Yet it is about a moral problem; so is the next one, which is coming out in autumn and is called A Friend from England” (Art of Fiction, 166). In response to the “favourite author” question posed by interviewer Mick Brown in 2009, Brookner included James for his “tentativeness. It’s all about betrayal, tiny incidents of bad faith, and that a very intriguing proposition, and inexhaustible” (Brown, 2). “Have either been an influence on you?” Brown asked, referring also to the novelist’s admiration for Proust. “No”, responded Brookner. “Has anybody? Brown probed. “I don’t think so”, she replied. In this exchange Brookner resists Brown’s attempt to contain her reading of James to the private sphere discourses of personal favourites and influence. In Chapter One I argue that the biographical narrative construction of “Anita Brookner”, representations of Dickens, of Brookner’s research interests and later of her career as a Romantic art historian, constitute the production of a “nineteenth-century effect”. I maintain that, in the developmental, Oedipal organization of Brookner’s biographical narrative, the nineteenth-century effect is substituted into the symbolic position of the mother, by way of Brookner’s Jewishness. On account of inhabiting the symbolic position of mother, in combination with its inculcation in private sphere discourses, the nineteenth-century effect is implicitly produced as a snare in Brookner’s heterosexual romance. As a result, signifiers of the nineteenth century come to stand for Brookner’s personal and sexual failure. Consequently, in mainstream criticism, the signification of James is suspended within private sphere discourses which occupy a low status position in the cultural field. I distinguish between discourses of influence which emphasise the private life of the celebrity author and discourses of intertextuality as a strategic and critical mode to contextualise relations between texts.

to be continued

Brookner on Stendhal. The Military Man. Notes for a reading of A Friend from England (1987)

2009-05-22T15:21:00.031+10:00

My PhD introduces "performative Romanticism" as a critical strategy for reading Brookner. Performative Romanticism is a form of intertextual interpretation which uses epistemological formations and methodological strategies of nineteenth-century texts to read Brookner's contemporary fiction. In each of my five chapters on five Brookner novels, I identify specific intertexts from which I generate an epistemological formation for my reading. I use varying methodologies of nineteenth-century texts to read the nineteenth-century epistemologies as I suggest they emerge in Brookner's contemporary novels.

I'm currently redrafting Chapter Two on A Friend from England (1987). The intertexts that I identify come from the narratives of Stendhal, Freud and Henry James. My contention is that certain Romantic personae or Romantic figures become discursive in these narratives. These figures are "The Military Man" in Stendhal, "The Analysand" in Freud and "The Queer" in James. I refer to these figures as "epistemological formations" insofar as they produce knowledge in coherent discursive formations, most accessibly in the form of the subject. In the following posts I'm examining how Brookner's critical narratives (in her art history, reviews or interview paratexts) narrate these figures. By identifying the key modes of Romantic behaviour in these figures, as they emerge in her critical oeuvre, I establish the epistemological foundations from which my interpretation of the novels can proceed.

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The Military Man
"Stendhal was a loser", Brookner told Michael Barber in 1983. "He was basically a very sad figure. Unattractive. Unlucky. But he never allowed himself to dwell on it. He was always on to the next strategem, the next party, the next bit of work.” Associating Brookner with losers is not an uncommon phenomenon; within mainstream criticism the Brookner protagonist "the Brooknerine" is identified as a failure ad infinitem (ie Alison Light represents Brooknerines as "life's losers and its natural solitaries", A Family Romance (reviewed) New Statesman & Society, 6.n260, July 9, 1993, 33.) The difference in this case, however, is that Brookner is the critical authority rather than the object, and her own object is the celebrated nineteenth-century French Romantic writer Henri Beyle or "Stendhal". Commemorated here in the signifier "loser", the similarities between Brookner's contemporary British (predominately female) subjects and nineteenth-century French Romantic male artists are not as unlikely as their difference in historical period, gender, nationality, occupation and even genre might indicate. According to Brookner, Romanticism is about "modes of behaviour" (Publishers Weekly, September 1985); "Romanticism is about forms of behaviour; it is therefore recognisable" (RD, 1). A central proposition of my thesis is that Brookner's contemporary fictional protagonists enact a type of nineteenth-century Romantic behaviour. My contention is that this "Romantic performativity" can best be interpreted through an intertextual reading that mobilises contemporary criticism of nineteenth-century literature.

If you think of Brookner as a producer of Romanticism - or as a producer of a type of Romantic spectacle- then Stendhal is one of the lead performers in a cast which also includes Baudelaire, Freud, Henry James, the Goncourt Brothers and J-K Huysmans. Idiosyncratic modes of behaviour emerge in Brookner's narrative construction of Stendhal, as with her other Romantic personae. These behaviours are narratively and tropologically reignited in Brookner's fiction. Thus, insofar as Brookner produces Romanticism through the behaviour of her critical subjects, it is possible to identify the performance of Romanticism as it emerges in her fictional texts.

Brookner associates Stendhal with three key Romantic behaviours. The first concerns the subject's response to loss, both on historical (public) and biographical (private) planes. The second concerns way in which the subject is constituted through modes of Romantic affect. The third concerns the relationship between aesthetic production and historical context.

1. Romanticism as Loss.
"Romanticism doesn't make sense unless you realise that it grew out of the French Revolution", Brookner told Shusha Guppy in 1987 (The Art of Fiction, 154). In Romanticism and its Discontents Brookner explains that, following the Battle of Waterloo in 1814, "the shame of defeat at the hands of a traditional enemy brought to light frustrations which might otherwise have lain undetected: the enfant du siecle was born" (RD, 1). As an art movement, Romanticism grew out of the subjective experience of loss. Citoyens had first suffered from a loss of faith in religion, later in Enlightenment reason and subsequently from military defeat and the loss of a charismatic political leader in Napoleon. Romanticism manifests as a mode of grieving. As Baudelaire was to say, "Nous celebrons tous quelque enterrement" (We're always attending someone's funeral).

Stendhal was particularly sensitive to France's defeat because of his personal experience as a soldier in Napoleon's army. Brookner states,

The Russian experience was never erased from Stendhal’s mind. He gained from it a personal knowledge of life’s very great circumstances; he gained the right to speak in the name of the new generation; he assumed the right to weigh all aesthetic sensations against the standard of this particular catharsis. (GF, 39)

Prior to his military career, Stendhal's formative years were characterised by the dandyism of one whose awareness of possibility far exceeds their experience and who therefore lacks a solid foundation on which to establish a meaningful dialogue. Brookner's unaggressive Freudianism flags problematic mother-child relationships in the lives of many of the Romantics, including Stendhal, Baudelaire & Huymans (RD, 165). For Stendhal, the loss of his mother conjoins deep ambition. Leaving the provinces for Paris, he believed that life was a game and the rules could be learned. Brookner describes him as, "a man completely led astray" (GF, 37). It is this incarnation of Stendhal as a strategist, mistakenly holding that life can be directed from the surface, that creates a displeasing effect in his treatise On Love. In ways, it also informs aspects of Machiavellianism in The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black.

Through what Brookner calls "a happy accident of history" (Stendhal's experience in Napoleon's army) he encounters something big enough to make him an artist. At the outset, Stendhal's activities as an army officer imbued him with a sense an enormous sense of possibility, a pursuit of a kind of heroic happiness (GF, 34). "Patrolling the frozen Danube took him a long way from worrying about the impact of his entrance into a salon" (GF, 38). Subsequently, however, loss also initiated him into post-Revolutionary boredom or disenchantment. Boredom precipitated the Romantic subject into a search for new experiences. In Baudelaire it manifests in an exploration of the senses, frequently via narcotics. Brookner claims that boredom climaxes in Baudelaire's generation of Romantics, those whom experience "the aftermath of defeat without the compensating memory of heroic action" (GF, 36). Later it degenerates into the neurotic and decadent ennui asssocaited with J-K Huysmans. It is interesting to note here that "boredom" is one of the reasons Brookner offers when asked why she became a novelist. "Intense boredom, I think" she told Michael Barber, "Desire to try something new. There aren't many chances for taking a risk in art history. It was a pastime. A summer exercise. I was unhappy. I wanted to do something with it. I didn't want to languish." (Barber, 27)

Stendhal's military experience is infused throughout his performance as a subject and in his critical and fictional narratives. Brookner describes his performance as "unique, highly personal, very idiosyncratic, and stamped with a virile, almost military character which was natural enough in his own early years but which, as the nineteenth century progressed, took on the aura of a vanished age of heroism" (GF, 33). She contextualises the History of Painting in Italy with the claim that it was "written in a manner more reminiscent of a soldier-philosopher than of a historian and aesthetician" (GF, 44). This is both on account of its military reminiscences, and also due to the chronotope of composition: the first draft was lost during the retreat from Moscow and had to be entirely rewritten. These circumstances effect a military character in the narrative: "Stendhal feels, therefore, that as the author has survived such personal perils he is allowed to take an independent and never entirely reverent or submissive attitude to his material" (GF, 44). In Stendhal's fiction, Brookner identifies "terse, short military sentences" (GF, 36) as a disguise for deep emotion.

2. The Romantic moi as a subject of affect
Stendhal's experiences affected him emotionally and through that deep emotion he discovered his point of view. In this sense the Romantic subject is constituted through an epistemology of affect. Brookner nominates energy and scepticism as the cardinal factors of Stendhal’s performance: energy to propel passion and scepticism applied to historical circumstance. From the experience of living and losing on an epic scale, Stendhal was driven to cultivate the rigorous self-examination necessary for generating the type of insight capable of producing an original, contemporary perspective. Thus self-examination becomes the methodology of the Romantic subject. In the Salon of 1824, Stendhal wrote:

My aim is to make each onlooker question his own soul, define his own way of feeling, and thus to form his own judgement and a way of seeing fashioned on his own character, tastes and predominant emotions, if indeed he has any emotions at all, for unfortunately they are necessary in judging the arts. (GF, 50)

The self-examination attending intense emotion was neither an exercise in comfort nor in morality. It is about generating an aesthetic that represents the full and true contemporary experience (GF, 39). Stendhal compared the Romantic artist to a soldier. "It takes courage to be a Romantic because one must take risks" (RD, 5) he stated in Racine et Shakespeare. Brookner explains:

And if this new risk-taking breed, testing every received idea to destruction, should find that doubt or despair or curiosity might interfere with his perception of what until that time had been regarded as appropriate, then it would come about that new forms, new approximations to what was newly perceived as occasionally or even frequently compulsive, would emerge and would overtake that hitherto sturdy consensus of eighteenth-century truths which no longer served to explain the world. (RD, 5)

Brookner continues:

A soldier not only takes risks with himself; he takes risks with others. It should be remembered that the Romantic painter has designs on the spectator. He is out to remove the spectator from his normal or appropriate perceptual field, and in doing so infect him with his personal doubts... In front of a true Romantic picture the spectator will be forced constantly to adjust his stance, stepping backward or forward or sideways, disconcerted, discomfited, sometimes physically uneasy. (RD, 5-6)

In this passage Brookner demonstrates how Romantic affect becomes important in Romantic aesthetic production. A key objective of Romantic aesthetic production is to transfer the anxiety which accompanies a loss of meaning from the producer to the consumer.

3. "A new idiom for a new age": Aesthetic production and historical context: the production of the contemporary. (GF, 47)
Stendhal is concerned with formulating an aesthetic precisely for people like himself (GF, 39). With this contention, comes an early formulation of the belief that art should reflect its historical context and subjects. And with this proposition comes a glimpse of literary realism: “The author thinks that, except for the hero’s passion, a novel should be a mirror” (Stendhal in the preface to Lucien Leuwen GF, 53). "What is remarkable" Brookner emphasises, is that Stendhal is not advocating a change in dramatic form for purely literary reasons, but that he "is proposing a literary change for historical, social, and moral reasons" (GF, 47). “I want my language to suit the children of the Revolution, the people who look for thought rather than beauty of style, the people who took part in the Russian campaign and who witnessed the curious transactions of 1814” (GF, 47-8).

The notion that aesthetic production should be representative of is historical context and subjects had important repercussions. On a number of levels it was invested in chronotopic production or periodisation. First, in generating a nineteenth-century chronotope around types of Romantic affect. As Stendhal said, “It is not hard to see what the nineteenth century is looking for: a growing thirst for strong emotions is its true character”; “It is, then, by passionate depiction of the human heart that the nineteenth century will stand out from previous centuries”. Secondly, it situated the contemporary as a key category of Romantic temporality. In Brookner criticism, this becomes problematic when the contemporary is produced in opposition to nineteenth-century representational strategies. Third, in linking historical context, historical subject and discursivity it anticipates the historicist premise that “we are subjects of our time”. The unacknowledged conflation of the different forms of production that create text, context and subject results in the hetero-chronic determinism of mainstream Brookner criticism.

New Brookner Interview

2009-03-16T07:10:00.001+11:00

A rare treat. An interview with Brookner in the UK Telegraph. Thanks once again to the reader who let me know.

Favourite passages from the novels

2009-03-14T11:59:00.007+11:00

Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography. p11-12 A Misalliance.

Tragedy in Family and Friends p70-71
Dressed in her best cream silk dress, she sits by the window and watches the moon rise above the Tuileries. It has now turned seven and she is beginning to feel hungry. She calculates that in half an hour she will ask for a sandwich and some coffee to be brought up, so that when Frank comes - and he will now probably want to take her out to dinner - she will not have spoiled her appetite. By this time she is so awake, so ardent, that all appetites seem inexhaustible. At eight o'clock she asks for her sandwich and eats it absent-mindedly, still bound up in this extraordinary dream of love that fulfils her imaginatively over and above the circumstances of the time, the place, and the hour. At nine o'clock she leans back in her chair, a little tired, her eyes still wide with the vision of Frank's arrival. She is aware that at some point a maid has turned down the bed and has left the room silently with the tray. A little later it comes to her with the force of revelation that Frank has had to dine with Betty, that he will see her back to the Hotel des Acacias, and will then make his way across the city to the Rue de Rivoli: Mimi's impression that Frank will call to take her out to dinner is suddenly overtaken by the much stronger impression that he will now steal into her room like a lover, like a theif in the night. Hastily she removes her dress and pulls down her hair; then, in her plain white nightgown, she resumes her seat by the window. Since she can now see nothing she listens all the more intently. She hears the occasional motor car; she hears footsteps in the corridor and the diminishing sound of voices. She seems to hear a clangorous bell, although there are no churches in this district and the bell is probably in her head. The intense darkness envelops her, envelops her inviolate dream. At some time in that interminable night she lies down on her bed; on her face the smile is tinged with intimations of the most absolute horror.

In the morning Mimi leaves Paris, a city to which she will never return.

From Look at Me (1983), the opening paragraph:
Once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And, in a way that bends time, so long as it is remembered, it will indicate a future. It is wiser, in every circumstance, to forget, to cultivate the art of forgetting. To remember is to face the enemy. The truth lies in remembering.

Familiars - New!

2009-03-06T17:22:00.008+11:00

Corny header, I know, but it's kind of true. It's confronting reading Brookner, mostly because I relate to her characters so strongly. There's a new lightness about Strangers. I feel like it barely draws any attention to itself as a representational medium. There's more dialogue than usual too.

The first thing that struck me was her Author's Note - i think her first. Then the epigraph by Freud. And the Brookner repetition.

One favourite line so far: "He was depressed by the state of the weather, as all those who had little contact with nature (now known as the environment, he reminded himself)..." (pg 51).

There are flashes of A Misalliance. A Misalliance cracks me up though, i think it's so funny. Blanche is to die for; I love that line about her drinking when she says something like "you won't see my winding around a lamp-post with a riotous hat over one eye" (totally paraphrasing there).

Anyway, I digress. Strangers made me think all the Romantics had contentious relationships with their mothers ie that's what Romantic longing is - in a Freudian (possibly reductive) context anyway. I recall Brookner writing about this mother - son dynamic with the Family Baudelaire. Funny, those words don't seem to go together.

Paul Sturgis of Strangers is a reader protagonist. I remember one funny review of Brookner which asked, why don't Brooknerines read Brookner? (ie the authentic, fictional Brooknerines, not us wannabe Brooknerines). Oo the Wannabe Brooknerine. A paradox... Unless, ugh, Emo?

He would go to the London Library, seek consolation among the stacks, take out books that he had read before and would read again, find instruction and even corroboration in writers who, miraculously, seemed neither afraid nor ashamed to reveal their inadequacies, their disappointments, and whose very failures went some way to strengthen him in his long search for a fellow spirit, and, in the absence of such a spirit, for an understanding of his own life. (p90).

Representations of Australiennes in Brookner's Strangers - New!

2009-03-03T16:09:00.009+11:00

Another interesting thing that's emerged about Strangers is the fact that one character is an Australian female. The first Australian Brooknerine. Apparently a hairdresser!!!

Perhaps she's another Keitha.

Having completed the book, I find this was nothing to get excited about. Perhaps Brookner's representation of Australiennes in Strangers reflects the significance of Australiennes in Brookner's oeuvre. In my thesis I would say that it produces the minimal significance of Australiennes. If i never use the word produces one more time I would be a happy Australienne. Somehow it has connotations of butcher to me too -> not good.

Anyway, the Australienne hairdresser is headed back home.
"Shan't be seeing you again," said his usual hairdresser.
"Oh?"
"Going back to Australia."
"Oh I'm so sorry..." (p198).

Strangers reviews - New!

2009-02-27T11:46:00.005+11:00

I'm hoping my copy of Strangers arrives in the post next week. I'm planning a day around it. Coffee at my favourite cafe, then later Champagne at my favourite bar. Hopefully this will fit in with my life. Nearly as exciting is waiting for the reviews to come out. I'll try and keep an account of them here.

And i hear my very own sister will be reviewing Strangers for Readings. Stay tuned.

First up is a nice one from Helen Dunmore. There's even a pic of AB, which reminds me of the caricature of her in the TLS calendar a few years ago.

Okay, everyone loves Brookner now. This makes me feel scared, jealous and insecure. Hang on - i felt that anyway. Btw i haven't read all of these yet. Repeat paragraph.

Apparently there's 3 reviews in The Guardian(?!) Could someone tell me why?
Mark Lawson in The Guardian.
Hilary Mantel in The Guardian.
Rachel Cooke in The Guardian.
Susie Boyt in The Independent.
Sebastian Smee in The Spectator.
Peggy Hughes in Living . Scotsman.
Lorna Bradbury in The Telegraph.
The Digested Read of Strangers.

Brookner renaissance

2009-01-29T13:29:00.004+11:00

Brookner's third novel Look At Me (1983) is on The Guardian's list of "1000 novels everyone must read." That's incredible because it was one of Brookner's most despised. I think it's brilliant and personally tragic and quite raw. I believe Brookner was referring to Look At Me in this 2002 interview in The Independent when she said, "I hate those early novels. I think they're crap. Maybe I needed to write them... They're morbid, they're introspective and they lead to no revelations."
(When asked, "Has she a favourite among her works?" She replied, "I don't like any of them very much.")

The upcoming release of Strangers in March is featured The Guardian's "Literary treats in store for 2009".

I wonder if AB will do a new interview?

Brookner season

2009-01-26T14:10:00.004+11:00

Brookner surfaces again! This time she reviews Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles. The review was in the UK Spectator (which has the curious byline of "Champagne for the brain") in December 2008 but I only caught up with it this weekend, courtesy of my mother who feverishly rushed over brandishing the arts section of the Weekend Australian, in a manner that intimated her health might be endangered on the occasion that someone we actually knew was published. It is exciting seeing Brookner's name in new places. It's a name I often type when I'm meant to be typing something else. (Champagne is not for the brain.)

Brookner describes Karpeles' methodology of extracting references to art in the novel as a means by which to elucidate character as "seductive and enlightening". This is interesting because Brookner's novels, like Proust, contain many references to art.

Strangers (2009)

2009-01-09T21:29:00.003+11:00

This is incredibly exciting. Due out in March. Many thanks to the reader who let me know.
Fantastic fiction has a teaser. And you can pre-order on amazon.

Governing Images

2008-12-09T15:46:00.009+11:00

My thesis examines five of Brookner's twenty-three novels. In the introduction to each of the five text-based chapters I use an image from the novel as the organising trope for my discussion. The images are as follows:

A Friend from England (1987)
Giorgione's La Tempesta 1500-1508
Giorgione's La Tempesta, x-ray reconstruction, 1939.

A Misalliance (1986)
Images of nymphs from a selection of paintings in the National Gallery, London.
Pan and Syrinx, 1759. BOUCHER, François 1703 - 1770
Nymphs surprised by Satyrs about 1650-60, WOUTERS, Franchoys 1612 - 1659/60
Two Mythological Figures, probably about 1548-50, SCHIAVONE, Andrea, attributed to. Died: 1564
A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term 1632-3 POUSSIN, Nicolas 1594 - 1665
Brief Lives (1990)
Figure 1: A page from Aubrey's Brief Lives.

Figure 2: Composite image of objects from Brookner's Brief Lives.

Undue Influence (1998)
Map: Forthcoming

Falling Slowly (1999)
J.M.W. Turner "Sunrise with a Ship between Two Headlands" (1840-1845)

Criticisms of Brookner

2008-08-19T17:00:00.019+10:00

Criticisms of Brookner are insightful insofar as they i) generate an epistemology of the Brookner text and ii) reflect contemporary expectations of text, context and reader. In my research I've discovered that the Brookner "paratext" - ie the text created about the author and her work by the media and publisher in book reviews and author interviews - has been a dominant influence on readings of Brookner. As a result I've been particularly interested in Brookner reviews and interviews. While the distinction between book reviews, interviews and academic criticism has been necessary, useful and instructive on matters of genre, at times it is also artificial and so lately i've been less keen to maintain a formal division in my readings of Brookner.

I have an idea to blog about the spectrum of criticism that characterises Brookner reception. For now i've focused on the reviews but I may involve the other genres of criticism at a later stage. I've divided the criticisms into a number of categories, which i'll set out below and provide some examples. I have a vague plan to develop some informal reflections on each criticism in individual posts.

I've chosen to represent generally negative criticisms because they're more interesting and they have been most influential in producing the dominant signification of Brookner. "I'm interested in the reasons for failure," Brookner said in a Publisher's Weekly interview in 1985. And in 2001 she told The Observer that failure was "much more interesting than success."

Cataloging Criticism
I've divided criticisms into the following categories:
Plotless; Repetitive/Boring; Depressing; The Brooknerine (Brookner's protagonists); Brookner Bashing; Time; Age; Place; The 19th Century Influence; Jamesian; Middlebrow; Privilege; Autobiographical; Unethical writing; Effect on Readers; Declining standard; Strangeness; Genre crossing; Misc.

Categories to add: Sex. Sex is an interesting case because it's generally dissimulated through every other topic. For example "lonely" is a polite way of saying not sexually active, a heterosexual failure, of ambiguous sexual identification, gay or closeted.

Plotless
Like most of her novels, Brief Lives is virtually plotless.
Lindsay Duiguid, “The downward drag and the loss of allure,” Times Literary Supplement, August 24-30, 1990, 889. On Brief Lives (1990).

Anita Brookner has purged her novels of nearly all incident, creating a kind of anti-plot... for the first 243 of these 275 pages nothing much happens.
Elizabeth Judd, “Making Things Better,” The Atlantic Monthly Vol.291, Iss 3, April 2003, 109. On The Next Big Thing (2003) (Making Things Better in the US).

Although only 220 pages long, it seems padded and interminable, its wispy story sabotaged by lengthy, disorganised and inconsequential passages of Claire's self-analysis and speculation.
Joyce Carol Oates, “Writing for the tortoise market,” Times Literary Supplement, July 30, 1999, 19. On Undue Influence (1999).

There is but one halfpennyworth of showing to an intolerable amount of telling in Anita Brookner's new novel... An event such as a visit to a restaurant arrives like an oasis.
Nicholas Clee, “Closed circuit,” Times Literary Supplement, June 17 1994, 22. On A Private View (1994).

Repetitive / Boring
Brookner’s tale may have benefited from abridgment as there is much repetition and superfluous detail here, much like the protagonist's life.
Jacqueline Seewald, “Private View,” Library Journal, v122.n6, April 1, 1997, 145. On A Private View (1994) audio recording.

Many early admirers have come to feel, as her novels appear punctually year by year, that Brookner is writing the same book over and over again... So we are left with a baffling question: why would a writer of Brookner's sophistication and intelligence repeat herself in this obvious fashion?
Angeline Goreau, “Family Plot”, New York Times Book Review, May 27 2001, 22.

There is much to bore a listener here.
Rochelle Ratner, “The Next Big Thing,” Library Journal, Vol.128 Iss.12, July 2003, 145. On The Next Big Thing (2003) audio recording (Making Things Better in the US).

Obsessional themes need not result in repetitive fictions, if the writer can invent reasonably new characters, situations and plots to express them; unfortunately there is little that is new or original in Undue Influence.
Joyce Carol Oates, “Writing for the tortoise market,” Times Literary Supplement, July 30, 1999, 19. On Undue Influence (1999).

Last June, when the British edition of this book was published, the London Review of Books' assessment began as follows: "Anita Brookner's first novel appeared in 1981. Since then she has published it again, slightly altered, almost every year"... Such are the perils of prolific authors; reviews eventually weary of them. And Brookner stands guilty of being astonishingly productive.
Paul Gray, “Understated Outrage at Growing Old,” The New Leader, 85, 6, Nov/Dec 2002, 44.

Depressing
Think of the most humiliating thing that has ever happened to you, the loneliest moment you have ever had, the time you have thought yourself ugliest and most unloved. Look at Me will remind you precisely how it felt.
Hermione Lee, “Melancholia in Maida Vale,” The Observer, 27 March, 1983, 32. On Look at Me (1983).

Her novels are almost unbearable in their unflinching examination of isolation and disappointment.
Claire Messud, “The Stifled Life,” New York Times Book Review, Jan 31, 1999, 7. On Falling Slowly (1998).

This is, even for Brookner, an unusually cheerless work.
Miranda Seymour, “The Mistress of Gloom,” The Atlantic Monthly, 287, 6, Jun 2001, 107. On The Bay of Angels (2001).

The Brooknerine;(Brookner’s protagonists)
Why does the extraordinarily successful Anita Brookner write popular novels about women who are failures?
Sally Blakeney, “Failing females”, The Australian, 26 September 1998.

life's losers and its natural solitaries.
Alison Light, “A Family Romance,” New Statesman & Society, 6.n260, July 9, 1993, 33.

A stalwart creature who just occasionally could do with a good shaking.
Angela Huth, “Moods and dooms,” The Spectator, 286, 8998, Jan 20, 2001, 32.

she does look like a bit of a fool.
Barbara Hardy, “A Cinderella’s loneliness,” Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 1984, 1019. On Hotel du Lac (1984).

Such women can neither experience, nor inspire, the smallest impulse towards anarchic behaviour.
Patricia Craig, “On not being overwhelmed,” Times Literary Supplement, August 29, 1986, 932.
On A Misalliance (1986).

Nobody likes dopey hangdog people who bring homemade quiches to sex trysts…
Take my advice. Quit moping. Get out of the house. Go shopping. Buy a television machine and watch some lovely humorous comedy programs. Take up a hobby, for heaven’s sake. As someone advised me once, go to cafes and say in a sprightly manner to the person at the next table, “That happened to me once too”…Think positively. Enough of this literary dawdling.
Heather Mallick, “Depressive tale lacks substance,” Toronto Sun, September 6, 1998. On Falling Slowly (1998).

Too well-behaved for a full-blown nervous breakdown.
Candice Rodd, “Drawing-room despair,” Times Literary Supplement, August 21, 1992, 17.

Brookner bashing
We… perhaps begin to long… for someone to give her characters a good shaking and a sensible talking to.
David Allen, “Lovers and other dangers”, The Australian, 19 October 1996.

I used to think Brookner was a genius, but now I just want to kick her in the shins.
Heather Mallick, “Depressive tale lacks substance,” Toronto Sun, September 6, 1998. On Falling Slowly (1998).

The desire to kick Anita Brookner’s heroines is always strong.
Jan Dalley, “Fraud,” Independent on Sunday, 23 August 1992. On Fraud (1992).

Time
It is almost a novel written out of time.
Barbara Hardy, “A Cinderella’s loneliness,” Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 1984, 1019. On Hotel du Lac (1984).

Brookner’s characters occupy only the vaguest of times and places.
Jan Zita Grover, “Small expectations: Anita Brookner’s Novels,” The Women’s Review of Books, 11:10, 11 July 1994, 39. General review.

Brookner muffles the outside world, gives no dates, mentions no political events, not even the name of a contemporary novel or play gives a sense of time.
Brenda Niall, “Alone again, naturally,” The Weekend Australian, April 7-8, 2001, R15. On The Bay of Angels (2001).

Age
There is something unresolved about their ages.
Gillian Tindall, “Safe sorrow,” Times Literary Supplement, July 10, 1998, 23. On Falling Slowly (1998).

When one reads of Heather tucking a rug around Rachel's legs in the car, one wonders if a young woman of twenty-seven would do that for another young woman, hardly older, even in England.
David Plante, “They Won Their Life on the Football Pools”, The New York Times Book Review, Sec 7 March 20, 1988, 9. On A Friend from England (1987).

The use of century rather than of place or era as a point of reference is paralleled in Brookner’s fiction by her characters’ peculiar ahistoricity.
Jan Zita Grover, “Small expectations: Anita Brookner’s Novels,” The Women’s Review of Books, 11:10, 11 July 1994, 39. (General review).

Self-pity (‘alone’, ‘always’) leads to absurdity. No self-conscious older woman could possibly 'welcome' the notion that an unknown and naked young man might wake to find her spying on him. As for that 'willingness to talk', the mind boggles.
Caroline Moore, “Baby, it’s cold outside,” The Spectator, London: Feb 19, 2005, Vol.297, Iss. 9211, 38. On Leaving Home (1995).

Place
Brooknerland… is confined mainly to London, with an important outpost in Paris and smaller ones in other European cities. But seek not for it on street maps; although actual squares, avenues, department stores, parks and libraries are named, Brookner's London is an alternative version that bears only a partial and deceptive resemblance to the real city... Essentially, it is very un-English.
Gillian Tindall, “Safe sorrow,” Times Literary Supplement, July 10, 1998, 23.

Anita Brookner’s 20th novel is set in London and southern France, some time in the 1950s. But in fact, we are nowhere so much as in Brooknerland.
Lisa Allardice, “The Bay of Angels,” New Statesman, 14, 678, Oct 15, 2001, 56. On The Bay of Angels (2001).

The 19th Century Influence
Brookner’s protagonists are endowed with the formality and asperity of a nineteenth-century heroine.
Patricia Craig, “On not being overwhelmed,” Times Literary Supplement, August 29, 1986, 932. On A Misalliance (1986).

Anita Brookner's novels are expert copies of nineteenth-century novels.
Sven Birkerts, “Private View”, The New Republic, v212.n17 April 24, 1995, 41. On A Private View (1994).

Based on the classic British novel of the nineteenth-century and embracing the post-Freudian angst of the twentieth.
Mary Kaiser, “Visitors,” World Literature Today, v72.n2 (Spring 1998), 369.

Jamesian
The difference between Brookner and James, one suddenly realises, is that James's characters are radically innocent... Brookner's characters are only radically dull.
Sven Birkerts, “Private View”, The New Republic, v212.n17 April 24, 1995, 41. On A Private View (1994).

Though Brookner is a sensitive analyst, she presses her theme where James merely touches.
Sven Birkerts, “Private View”, The New Republic, v212.n17 April 24, 1995, 41. On A Private View (1994).

When Henry James shows us the world through such a character, the reader is rewarded with an extraordinarily subtle challenge. But here we have only confusion and authorial disguise. If Brookner thinks we will be surprised at the novel's ending, she shows us as little respect as Claire does for Martin; if not she gives us a narrator unworthy of our respect.
Wendy Steiner, “She Who Won’t Be Obeyed”, New York Times Book Review, Jan 23, 2000, 34. On Undue Influence (1999).

Brookner has devoured James, and she drops what she has learned from him wholesale into her books. She is overly fond of mimicking his qualifying phrases 102
Deborah Friedell, “Disengagement”, The New Republic Feb 9, 2004, 32.

Middlebrow (include non-subversive)
Nostalgia for respectable bourgeois customs is a great appeal in Brookner's novels.
David Plante, “They Won Their Life on the Football Pools”, The New York Times Book Review, Sec 7 March 20, 1988, 9.

Agreeably middlebrow writing
David Allen, “British values under scrutiny”, The Australian, 8 November, 1997.

Privilege
The real fear in the heroines' lives is not to be found loveless but classless. Caste rather than class feelings animate them... obsessed by money while continually denying its importance. The materialists are always other people; the vagaries of the vulgar are displayed in orer to distance the heroines from them.
Alison Light, “A Family Romance,” New Statesman & Society, 6.n260, July 9, 1993, 33. On A Family Romance (1993).

Her protagonist is again one of those generally passive people, well provided with money and leisure time, who suddenly is moved to examine the unlived life.
Authorless review, “A Private View,” Publisher’s Weekly, v241.n47 November 21, 1994, 68. On A Private View (1994).

There is no real mystery in a Brookner novel. People (usually women) in good clothes, with civilised manners and quaint ways of speaking, inhabit a contained world of exquisitely decorated rooms and quiet libraries, constantly examining their emotional landscapes.
Barbara Love, “Falling Slowly,” Library Journal, 123.30, December 1998, 152. On Falling Slowly (1998).

Brookner's characters always live above the purses of most of her readers.
Miranda Seymour, “The Mistress of Gloom,” The Atlantic Monthly, 287, 6, Jun 2001, 107. On The Bay of Angels (2001).

Autobiographical
There are patches of sentimental, almost self-pitying prose in Providence - the result of the author's almost total identification with her heroine.
Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times”, The New York Times, C 1 February, 1984. On Providence (1982).

Jane - Brookner's narrator - a young, solitary, and circumspect woman who eventually becomes a children's author, tells us a great deal more about Brookner herself than most of her exquisitely limned characters.
Donna Seaman, “Dolly”, Booklist 90.n4 October 15, 1993, 395. On A Family Romance (1993) (Dolly in the US).

Unethical writing
Her author is cruel.
Barbara Hardy, “A Cinderella’s loneliness,” Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 1984, 1019. On Hotel du Lac (1984).

Brookner has a strange relish for humiliating her heroines.
Miranda Seymour, “The Mistress of Gloom,” The Atlantic Monthly, 287, 6, Jun 2001, 107. On The Bay of Angels (2001).

Why should his creator punish him for wanting more and fighting for it? 93
Sara Maitland, “Last chance saloon,” The Spectator 289, 9073, June 29, 2002, 40. On The Next Big Thing (2002) (Making Things Better in the US).

It is difficult to think of them as heroines, for a faint whiff of authorial contempt clings to them.
Jan Zita Grover, “Small expectations: Anita Brookner’s Novels,” The Women’s Review of Books, 11:10, 11 July 1994, 39. General review.

Effect on Readers
Readers who've found many of Ms Brookner's characters downright maddening in their capacity for hitting upon ways to stay lonely, depressed and miserable may very well lose patience with this novel.
Merle Rubin, “The Search for a Suitable Suitor”, Wall Street Journal Leisure & Arts, Jan 20, 1999, 1.

I confess to approaching her short novels with a certain degree of hesitation. As a reader it means being in the company of desperately unhappy people, whose understanding of their unhappiness is chillingly accurate.
Ron Charles, “Alone, all alone with Anita Brookner… again”, Christian Science Monitor, Jan 17, 2000, 17.

Who really wants to read Anita Brookner's repellently accurate novels about the intricacies of loneliness?
Ron Charles, “The retirement problem”, Christian Science Monitor, Jan 2, 2003, 12.

the ordinariness of life draws blood that weakens both character and reader... This loneliness that afflicts many of Brookner's characters is so profound that it blights the reader.
Anne Roiphe, “Altered States,” The New Leader, v79.n9, Dec 16, 1996, 28. On Altered States (1996).

The book's virtue is in making one want to debate it. It is impossible to read it passively.
Anne Duchêne, “Superior melancholy”, Times Literary Supplement, March 25 1983, 289. On Look at Me (1983).

Declining standard
Despite the sharp, engaging portraits of unhappy women, i wish now that Brookner would try again the larger canvas of Family and Friends, a few novels back, that chronicled a large family (the men of it too) over many years.
Alice Bloom, “A Friend from England,” The Hudson Review, 41, 1988-89, 544. On A Friend from England (1987).

Less and less is happening in Brookner's novels. Those of us who have bought and read all 17 of her books look back to the youthful, flashing emotion and stormy passages of Providence, Look at Me or Family and Friends with wonder and some regret.
Maggie Gee, “Don’t just do it, have a good think about it,” New Statesman, v126 n4345 August 1, 1997, 47. On Visitors (1997).

Brookner's themes are just as exhausted as Julius. Her renowned, razor-sharp perceptions and observations seem blunted here and expose not the puritannical sensibilities of a complex character but the doleful plodding of a flat one. While Brookner's sundry fans are sure to demand??? this work, it will leave many of them hoping for a stronger effort in keeping with her high standards.
Caroline Hallsworth, “Making Things Better,” Library Journal, 128, 1, Jan 2003, 151.

Despair in the past has made Brookner's fiction taut; here, it threatens slackness.
Caroline Moore, “Baby, it’s cold outside,” The Spectator, London: Feb 19, 2005, Vol.297, Iss. 9211, 38. On Leaving Home (2005).

Strangeness
A strange and disturbing book.
Sally Emerson, “Recent Fiction,” Illustrated London News, August 1981, 76. On A Start in Life (1980).

Strangely static.
Brenda Niall, “Alone again, naturally,” The Weekend Australian, April 7-8, 2001, R15. On The Bay of Angels (2001).

Accept them on their own strange terms.
Elizabeth Judd, “Making Things Better,” The Atlantic Monthly Vol.291, Iss 3, April 2003, 109. On The Next Big Thing (2003) (Making Things Better in the US).

Strangely devoid of friends.
Brian McFarlane, “A small, tenacious addiction to life,” The Saturday Age, 7 April, 2001, E11. On The Bay of Angels (2001).

Truly strange… a strange, interesting novel.
Caroline Moore, “Baby, it’s cold outside,” The Spectator, London: Feb 19, 2005, Vol.297, Iss. 9211, 38. On Leaving Home (2005).

Genre crossing
Fraud is less a novel than an examination of literary conscience.
Authorless review, “Fraud”, Time Magazine v141. N6 (Feb 8, 1993), 83. On Fraud (1992).

More of a character study than a conventional novel.
Sarah A. Smith, “Learnt from Life,” Times Literary Supplement, May 30 1997, 21. On Visitors (1997).

Rather more personal essays than prose fiction.
Joyce Carol Oates, “Writing for the tortoise market,” Times Literary Supplement, July 30, 1999, 19. On Undue Influence (1999).

Sarah is not intended to be a character. Rather, she is a symbol.
Mona Knapp, “Altered States”, World Literature Today v71. N2 (Spring 1997), 385. On Altered States (1996).

An author flirting with self-parody.
Nicholas Clee, “Closed circuit,” Times Literary Supplement, June 17 1994, 22. On A Private View (1994).

She is less a character in the novel than an exegete of the novel.
Deborah Friedell, “Disengagement,” The New Republic, Feb 9, 2004, 32. On The Rules of Engagement (2004).

Something oddly awry with the pacing of the novel.
Sara Maitland, “Last chance saloon,” The Spectator 289, 9073, June 29, 2002, 40. On The Next Big Thing (2002) (Making Things Better in the US).

A curious inversion of stream-of-consciousness.
Maggie Gee, “Don’t just do it, have a good think about it,” New Statesman, v126 n4345 August 1, 1997, 47. On Visitors (1997).

Misc.
Of course her range is quite narrow, her incuriosity quite stupendous.
Boyd Tonkin, “Private View”, New Statesman & Society, v7.n308 June 24, 1994, 40.

The Plot Summary - A Friend from England (1987)

2008-08-19T07:34:00.009+10:00

Literary criticism is really a glorified plot summary. I have a terrible aversion to the plot summary, which so often has overdetermined and stifled Brookner interpretation. But it serves a purpose, so I need to productively mobilise it myself. Its function is to facilitate reading, so it's kind of like Metamucil to the thesis, or the breakfast, which if skipped, can incur disaster. These days I'm more sympathetic to the idea that someone will be reading the thesis. Previously any idea of an audience seemed rightfully ludicrous. (Not like writing 80,000 words about 5 novels.)

A Friend from England (1987)
The narrator of A Friend from England, Rachel Kennedy, is a single, 32-year-old Londoner and a partner in a bookshop. Set in the 1980s, Rachel recalls a period of time defined by her complicated responses to the personal decisions made by the "striking" Heather Livingstone. Following the death of her father years previously, Rachel inherits Heather's father Oscar as her accountant and is befriended by the Livingstone family. Rachel idealises the Livingstones as an image of a "Victorian" family and is simultaneously fascinated and alienated by their material and emotional security. Conversely, the Livingstones perceive Rachel as a "feminist" and someone who might coax Heather out of her perceived passivity. Throughout the narrative Rachel emphasises her "extensive" sexual experience, the debilitating effects of her hydrophobia and comments on the contemporary experience of women. While socialising with the Livingstone family, Rachel notices a change in Heather which culminates in Heather's announcement of her engagement to Michael Sandberg. Rachel's narrative follows Heather's engagement party, wedding and her return to London following her honeymoon. After Rachel "outs" Michael in a gay bar, her narrative then traces Heather's marriage break-up, trip to Italy, Heather's mother's illness, Heather's return to Italy and subsequent engagement to an Italian. On a number of occasions, Rachel confronts Heather about her behaviour and tries to influence her decisions. Finally Rachel travels to Venice to attempt to persuade Heather to return to England.

I wonder if i can use this plot summary in my thesis? Is there anything terribly wrong with it? How could it be improved?

Literature & History paper

2008-07-25T07:55:00.005+10:00

Below is the paper I presented for the Literature & History conference and images of my handout.

"Anita Brookner, performative Romanticism, the dandy and Brief Lives (1990)"

Today I am discussing Anita Brookner’s 10th novel, Brief Lives, first published in 1990. Brookner has written 23 novels, 8 biographical studies of Romantic art criticism and numerous essays on art, literature and history. Despite some popular acclaim – such as winning the Booker prize for Hotel du Lac in 1984 – Brookner has been neglected by critical disciplines. Accused of being boring, repetitive and old-fashioned, she has been stereotyped as a lonely, single woman and this has not stimulated the critical imagination. Brookner’s particular location in the genre of women’s writing denies the avant-garde readings that her connections to fin-de-siecle Aestheticism might otherwise invoke. I believe Brookner’s work precipitates a crisis of interpretation as a result of its historical and generic crossings and their impact on representations of gender and sexuality. In her art criticism, Brookner defines Romanticism as a form of behaviour, which I suggest can be interpreted as a mode of performative behaviour. In my PhD I take the idea of performative Romanticism, discernible in narrative behaviour, and use it in conjunction with an intertextual analysis to provide an alternative reading to the dominant Brookner stereotype.

BL has been criticised for its layers of inconsequential detail. In this paper I suggest the challenge it presents can be identified through the question, “How is detail “brief”? I turn to the Brief Lives constructed by the 17th century antiquarian, John Aubrey, for clues as to how an intertextual interpretation might proceed. Like Brookner’s Brief Lives, Aubrey’s Brief Lives are found problematic as a result of their detail. In the late 19th century, French Symbolist poet Marcel Schwob mobilised Aubreyan detail as a way of imagining a type of Romantic persona. Aubrey’s appropriation in fin-de-siecle Aestheticism and the intersection of Brookner’s Romantic art criticism with French Aestheticism suggest further possibilities for an intertextual interpretation. I examine three ways in which “the detail” was significant to fin-de-siecle Aestheticism and propose to read Brookner’s novel through the figure of the dandy. I use Balzac’s delineation of dandyism along the vectors of walk, talk, eat and dress to examine these modes of performance in Brookner’s Brief Lives. Finally I analyse the intersection and queering of these performative modes through a rise-and-fall narrative.

BL is a novel about a former actress, the strikingly beautiful, iconic Julia Morton, a woman with an “unforgettable stage presence.” It’s narrator Fay Dodworth – or Faded Worth as one reviewer pointed out - was also a performer, of less renown, and her representations of Julia as a “cult object” are interspersed with other recollections. The story opens with Fay reading about Julia’s death at age 85. This triggers Fay’s memories of growing up, getting married and meeting Julia, their holidays in Nice, the death of her husband and her mother, her affair with Julia’s husband and his death and her relationship with Julia and their small circle of acquaintances. Within Fay’s narrative are a number of scenes in which Julia – now retired - holds court in the drawing-room of her West London residence, “reinforcing her ascendancy” in front of a small group of acolytes. Fay emphasises that neither she nor Julia really liked each other, that Julia found her boring, and that she was in fact rather dull and uninteresting. But at the same time it is a narrative of what Fay calls her “thraldom” to Julia, and it reflects her obsession with both Julia’s “monstrous power” and her striking beauty.

Critics found BL “depressing”, “a cheerless read”, “painful to read” and “virtually plotless.” A common complaint was that the content contradicted the title. In “Understanding AB”, Cheryl Malcolm Alexander warns, “The title may at first appear to be a misnomer… The brevity to which the title refers would seem to have more to do with the periods of happiness these characters enjoy.” And according to The New York Times, “the narrator’s monumental gloom makes you wish certain lives in Brief Lives were briefer”. Attention turned to the first person narrator. In her book on Brookner’s later fiction, Inger Bjorkman calls the narrator “absurd”. In the Hudson Review, Tom Wilhelmus notes that the narrator’s “tone” manages “to hide everything – including some very scandalous activity.” Alexander claims that Fay’s narrative was “speculative at best” and registers a range of “wholly inconsequential and everyday scenes” in the text. Her contention was that “understatement and the supplying of seemingly inconsequential information are common features of Brookner’s writing.”

It’s true that even by Brookner’s standards the levels of inconsequential detail in BL seem unusual and make it difficult to determine what information is significant. These details range from banal comments, such as “I sat looking at the humming telephone, and then, very quietly, put it down” (BL, 128) to extemporary narrative techniques, for example, “I remember at the time I went to the hairdresser’s” to observational detail: “through the window a tiny silver plane was a point of brilliance in a cloudless light blue sky” (BL, 133). Representations of “the inconsequential” also form a key component of the narrator’s strategy of self-representation: “My activities were completely inconsequential” (BL, 80) or “I was too uninteresting to be eligible” (BL, 178), she says.

The problematic title prompted the TLS’s Lindsay Duiguid to draw an intertextual connection between Brookner’s BL and the BL constructed by the seventeenth-century polymath John Aubrey. Aubrey’s Brief Lives are an assemblage of different types of media detailing over four hundred lives of “the famous and the not so famous.” Kate Bennett emphasises the ornamental nature of the manuscripts and the materiality of the Lives when she describes the work as “paper museums” & cabinets of curiosities as well as literary texts.”

Lindsay Duguid maintained that “Anita Brookner’s Brief Lives are the opposite of Aubrey’s – which are public, eventful and male.” However, the chaotic organization of the manuscripts, the way in which they reference and catalogue the non-book objects with which they are stored, the notational markings which defy publishing codes and their narrative style has meant that over the years, Aubrey’s Lives have been susceptible to interpretation disguised as presentation. Similarly accused of being “virtually plotless” the interpretation of Aubrey’s BL hangs on the question of how to contextualise the vast amounts of seemingly inconsequential detail in the manuscripts.
[Here are 2 pages from Aubrey’s manuscripts. You can see their chaotic organization – the deletions, drawings, idiosyncratic punctuation and marginal notes concerning this project & others. All examples of how they are considered to resist print culture.]

John James Purdon discovered a prominent yet frequently overlooked Greek inscription printed in front of the title of Aubrey’s first manuscript and he argued that it could be used to clarify the “latent ambiguity” attending Aubreyan interpretation. [SLIDE –] Purdon uses this word to propose ways in which to interpret the “brief” in Aubrey’s title, which suggests that a similar strategy might applied to Brookner’s identically-named text. The word translates as “extemporary” or “pieces written on the spur of the moment”. Therefore Purdon argues that the “brief” of the title refers to the style and circumstances of the narration rather than the content of the Lives.

Unpublished until the 19th century, the reception of Aubrey’s Lives was historically synonymous with the development of Romanticism. In 1896, the French Symbolist poet, Marcel Schwob, published Imaginary Lives, a collection of fictionalised biographies of historical personalities. Celebrated as “a manifesto of Decadent aesthetics,” Schwob’s preface to Imaginary Lives is a homage to John Aubrey. Schwob maintained that it was Aubrey’s representation of “idiosyncratic detail” that captured a person’s unique qualities. Such detail included Aubrey’s representations of the flies which annoyed Hobbes by landing on his bald head, and that Dr Fuller worked so hard he often ate a roll without even noticing it. Within discourses of late nineteenth-century Aestheticism, inconsequential detail was mobilised as a technique through which a certain type of Romantic character was fantasised. Based on the representation of detail, Schwob’s production of Aubrey provides an intertextual link to Brookner’s 19thc art criticism.

“The detail” was an object of significance to nineteenth-century Aestheticism in three ways.

Firstly, “the detail” connoted a new emphasis on the material object. This was historically compatible with the growth of industrial modernity and a development that was registered in 19th century representational practices. In La Maison d’un Artiste (1881) the Goncourt Brothers ascribed value to textual fragments such as dressmakers’ bills, menus and bulletins describing the state of the king’s health (GF, 135). In her art criticism Brookner claimed that the Goncourt’s “documentary approach” was “very far-sighted” (GF, 135). Likewise she privileged the “endless descriptions” in Huysmans’ Against Nature and its “cataloguing approach” (RD, 167) as symptomatic of a progressive and confrontational nineteenth-century narrative form, which reflected the contested status of the object in the newly developing market economy. Brookner’s representation of the significance of detail in the Goncourts’ nineteenth-century text resembles Kate Bennett’s appreciation of the letters, drawings and legal documents Aubrey sewed and pasted into his manuscripts. It complements the way Schwob identifies the power of Aubreyan detail to render the biographical from the particular.

Secondly, “the detail” of late 19th century Aestheticism referred to a temporal condition, the aestheticised phenomenology of the moment. Walter Pater describes the “awful brevity” of experience which “gather[s] all… into one desperate effort to see and touch.” In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire refers to “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” element partly constitutive of modernity, evoking Aubrey’s emphasis on the “fugitive” life of the spoken word in his M8. Thus for fin-de-siecle Aestheticism, brevity was the temporality of the detail. Purdon reads the brevity of Aubrey’s title to suggest that the narrative form of Brief Lives is constitutive of its content. My argument is that the intertextual connection between Brookner’s BL and Aubrey’s BL - in conjunction with their intertextual connections to late Romanticism and its privileged construction of brevity as an aesthetic experience – make it possible to read the narration of Brookner’s BL, as a performative mode, as a type of Romantic performativity.

Thirdly, “the detail” was a signifier of the nineteenth-century persona of the dandy. In “Dandyism and Fashion,” Roland Barthes claimed it was “the detail” which he called the “next-to-nothing”, the je ne sais quoi, the manner etc” which engaged the dandy as an index of social, cultural and material status. I suggest that Aubrey’s appropriation in late 19th century Aestheticism for the representation of seemingly inconsequential detail, by those writers and artists who were intricately involved in the narration of 19th century dandyism suggests that the intertexual connection between Aubreyan detail and Brookner detail can be read through the figure of the dandy.

“Talk, walk, eat or dress and I will tell you who you are,” stated Balzac in Treatise of an Elegant Life. I take these vectors of dandyism as the mechanism by which to produce an epistemology of dandyism in Brief Lives. In Clare Tuite’s reading of Beau Brummell’s first biography she observes, that based on the generic contours of glamour, ruination and ephemeral endurance, the rise-and-fall narrative was the mechanism through which the figure of the dandy was written. I use the rise-and-fall narrative as a way to interpret the operation of the vectors of dandyism in the novel. I maintain that by assembling the detail of Brookner’s BL along the performative modes of walk, talk, eat and dress, the objects of a dandy narrative emerge and these can be used to reconstitute the text as a “paper museum” or a “cabinet of curiosities” similar to Aubrey’s Brief Lives.

Talk, walk, eat or dress: these vectors of dandyism operate to produce Julia’s glamour through Fay’s descriptions of Julia’s toilette and “performances” and they operate to shape Julia’s social capital insofar as it is calibrated through Fay’s elegantly designed menus and her flanerie movement through the streets of London at Julia’s instruction.

“Getting dressed was the most important part of Julia’s day,” Fay reports, adding that Julia preferred “the artificial climate of her dressing-room rather than anything more natural or more variable.” Julia’s histrionics are primarily staged in the drawing-room of her Onslow Square residence, a room which itself resembles the dressing-room and a space which invokes the dandy’s toilette. The dressing-room mobilises a cast of assistants and in Brief Lives these roles are performed by both Julia’s entourage and her audience. They include her dresser Pearl, a “journalist” turned dogsbody Maureen, Julia’s mother “perhaps the most perfect audience of all” and Fay “a secondary audience, a matinee audience”.

Fay describes Julia’s dressing by Lelong, Patou & Mms Gres. On the occasion of their first meeting, Julia arrives looking “ravishing” in black silk with a black silk turban by Mme Gres. [Slide: This is an image of Mme Gres wearing her signature turban. This is an image of a classic Mme Gres gown, with its Grecian drapery and its knot detail.]

Clara Tuite describes Brummell’s cravat (or knot) as a “vital accessory” of his “vocational dandyism”. She identifies that in Captain Jesse’s 19thc biography, Brummell’s rise-and-fall could be traced through the status of his cravat; the modes of production it necessitated signalling the glamorous heights of his dandyism and later its replacement by black linen, a signifier of his tragic deterioration. By contextualising the knot of the Mme Gres turban, gown and the chiffon handkerchief that Julia ties around the finger of her left hand – as signifiers of the 19thc figure of the dandy, Julia’s dressing, and later her undressing, can be read as part of a rise-and-fall narrative.

Fay extensively documents Julia’s hard sexy mannerisms (3), her strikingly tall slim body (3) her “beautiful eyelids”, the narrowness of her feet - necessitating custom made shoes - and her aquiline beauty. On one particularly shocking occasion, Julia is found in an ultramarine satin nightgown exposing “an expanse of white shoulder… in its way perfect, remarkable by any standards”. Fay’s observation that Maureen “gave the impression of being sexually null, since she devoted no thought to her hair and clothes” (BL, 144) indicates that the narrator’s focus on the dressing of her main subject is invested with an erotic significance.

As another of the dandy’s performative modes, talking is thematically and technically emphasised in Brief Lives. The name of the narrator Fay Dodworth, identifies her through the “fading” of words that Purdon claimed for Aubrey was constitutive of the brief life of oral narratives. As a professional singer and radio performer, Fay had an oral vocation. And as a diseuse or “mimic” Julia personifies the dandy’s mode of performance.

Inevitably arriving at Julia’s with a gift, Fay’s offerings become occasions for Julia’s adjudicating views on taste, lay rights for her claims to service and propel the narrator’s movement through her local environment as she dispenses with various errands. Fay’s narrative refers to over 20 sites around London, rendering traces of the city that reflect the Baudelairean ephemerality of modern life that is conjured by the brevity of novel’s title. By mapping these sites you can see a visual representation of the space Fay’s narrative traverses or the brevity of the late Romantic experience. Likewise these little maps can act as inserts to the novel, reconstituting the text in an intertextual reference to Aubrey’s “paper museums.”
[SLIDE – For awhile I’ve had this idea to “map out” some of Brookner’s novels and I was forced to actually attempt it the other day. So this is just a few of the sites that are mentioned in the novel. Up here is Harrods in Brompton Rd & Knightsbridge tube. Then you come down to Sth Kensington Station. Julia lives just nearby in Onslow Square, Fay’s house is in Gertrude St, off King’s Rd, later she moves to Drayton Gardens. The other asterix mark the addresses of some of the minor characters.]

Fay travels the streets to attend Julia’s in-house performances, with her gifts of tongue, of fruit tart and hothouse peach and madiera cake (BL, 64, 107). Julia is a “cult object” to the narrator and so frequent references to Julia’s diet of omelettes and whiskey both imbues it with cult status and reveals the heightened importance the narrator attributes to food and eating. Fay’s elegant menus and the delicate combination of textures, flavours and quantities they evoke are crafted to effect an aesthetic experience. Eating is produced as a mode of exchange between the two women and discourses of consumption are interwoven with those of desire in BL. This eroticisation of consumption enables the reading of Fay’s menus as small love poems to Julia.

Julia’s deterioration is witnessed over a few short episodes. Firstly, Fay notices an octave drop in Julia’s voice, her drawn features, an untouched whiskey – all coinciding with the departure of her dresser, Pearl and signalling the dissolution of components of the toilette and audience. Following the loss of Pearl, another type of jewel is lost and destroyed. Fay arrives at Onslow Sq and is “disproportionately shocked” to find Julia wearing only one earring, a reflection of the dereliction of Julia’s standards of dressing. Fay apprehends a gleam by Julia’s narrow left foot and raises an alert, yet the slow foot brushes over it, crushing Julia - crushing the jewel - into the carpet.

Over the course of these disturbing events, Julia begins “tormenting” (BL, 162) Fay about the (non-existent) sexual status of her relationship with Dr Alan Carter, a GP described as rude, (BL, 164) disappointing (BL, 164) and cruel (BL, 174). Incapable of procuring her desired response, Julia transfers the subject of her eroticised discourse onto discourses of consumption. “Have you been to bed with him yet?” she pries, then, “Is he coming to dinner?” Boiling with discomfort, Fay is forced to extend the invitation to Alan that has effectively been masterminded by Julia.

At this stage things both start to unravel and to come together. Fay is preparing dinner for Alan Carter, when she is summoned by Julia. She rushes to Onslow Sq, where Julia continues her interrogation, simultaneously undressing before Fay to “reveal the lingerie of a cocotte”. Trembling, Fay lowers Julia into the sweet-smelling bath, informing her that she and Carter might go away for a weekend. At this stage Julia grabs hold of Fay, either falling or pretending to fall, disarranging Fay’s hair and ripping her blouse. The two women are left arm-in-arm in mutual states of undress, before Fay returns home to finish preparing dinner. But her state of disarray prevents this from happening. She drops the terrine, sending a spray of carrot mousse across the floor and greets Carter with a ruined blouse, a ruined kitchen and a ruined evening. This provides the catalyst for the end of her thraldom to Julia. However, when Julia leaves for Spain, Fay notices that she might have been “imagining a decay of which there was no trace” (BL, 203) and Julia departs looking “exceedingly chic” (BL , 210) in a light grey suit with a fur coat over her arm.

Thus in BL the even the dandy’s fall and ruination is problematised. The novel begins with Fay reflecting on Julia’s death and ends with Julia’s voice inviting Fay to join her. This ephemeral endurance of the dandy complements the status of ruins for antiquarians such as John Aubrey.

In the abstract of this paper I pose the question of whether it is possible to read a contemporary novel as a 19th century text. By looking at the meaning of “the detail” in 19thc texts, and reading Brookner’s novel through the figure of the dandy, I attempt to read the text across historical temporalities and therefore to complicate the way in which Brookner has been produced as a contemporary novelist.

side A
side B

Brief Lives (1990) and the dandy.

2008-07-20T05:10:00.011+10:00

I am nearly ready for the Literature and History Conference at Macquarie Uni July 24 - 25.
My paper is a reading of the figure of the dandy in Brookner's Brief Lives (1990).
It's an intertextual interpretation of the representation of detail based on a reading of Aubrey's Brief Lives and Aubrey's appropriation in fin-de-siecle Aestheticism by Symbolist poet Marcel Schwob. Aubrey's Brief Lives are known for their idiosyncratic organisation, scandalous material and "inconsequential detail". Brookner's Brief Lives has also been criticised for its propagation of "seemingly inconsequential detail". In Marcel Schwob's Imaginary Lives (1896) he mobilised Aubreyan detail as an aestheticised rendering of character. Schwob is located with a group of artists and writers such as Karl-Joris Huysmans and the Goncourt Brothers whom Brookner represents as emblematic of late Romanticism in The Genius of the Future (1971) and Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000). "The detail" was significant to French Aestheticism in three main ways. I contend that "the detail" can be read through the figure of the dandy. I use Balzac's delineation of dandyism along the vectors of walk, talk, eat and dress to create an epistemology of dandyism in Brief Lives. In her reading of "the first dandy biography" Captain Jesse's Life of George Brummell, Clara Tuite states that, based on the generic contours of glamour, ruination and ephemeral endurance, the figure of the dandy is produced through a rise-and-fall narrative. In Brief Lives, I read the intersection and queering of the dandy's modes of performance through a rise-and-fall narrative.
The following images accompany my reading:

A page from Aubrey's Brief Lives which illustrates some examples of Aubreyan detail: marginal notes, deletions, line drawings (in this case a nativity chart (horoscope) and a coat of arms), chaotic text and idiosyncratic punctuation.
The ancient Greek word printed by Aubrey in front of the title of Brief Lives on his first manuscript. The word translates as "pieces written on the spur of the moment" or "extempore" as in "spontaneous" speech. John James Purdon uses it to interpret the meaning of "brevity" as constitutive of the style and circumstances of the text's narration, making a distinction between the narration of the text and the text's narrative.
The cover of Marcel Schwob's "Imaginary Lives" (translated from the French Les Vies Imaginaires (1896)). The preface has been celebrated as "a manifesto to Decadent aesthetics" and is a homage to John Aubrey.

An image of a dress by Mme Gres, showing characteristic Grecian drapery and "knot" detail. In Brief Lives (1990) the strikingly beautiful, monstrously vain, "iconic" Julia wear Mme Gres. Roland Barthes reads the knot of the dandy's cravat as a signifier of "the detail" mobilised as a index of cultural, material and social status. In Tuite's reading of Brummell's biography she describes Brummell's cravat as a signifier of his "vocational dandyism" and observes how it is a key subject of Jesse's rise-and-fall narrative. The knot of the Gres dress and turban and Julia's affectation of tying a chiffon handkerchief around the little finger of her left hand, can all be read as signifiers of the 19th century dandy.
Mme Gres wearing her signature turban.

My first map!

Brookner's "First Lines"

2008-06-19T11:17:00.006+10:00

My sister can quote the opening sentence of a number of her favourite novels. Despite the fact that I often have certain Brookner expressions run through my mind, or I find myself quoting Brookner to explain an experience rather than coming up with my own words (why reinvent the wheel?), I could only recall the first line of Brookner's first novel - plus the one I'm currently working on. So i decided to write them out here.

1. A Start in Life, London: Jonathan Cape, 1981
Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had be ruined by literature.

2. Providence, London: Jonathan Cape, 1982
Kitty Maule was difficult to place.

3. Look at Me, London: Jonathan Cape, 1983
Once a thing is known it can never be unknown.

4. Hotel du Lac, London: Jonathan Cape, 1984
From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey.

5. Family and Friends, London: Jonathan Cape, 1985
Here is Sofka, in a wedding photograph; at least, I assume it is a wedding, although the bride and groom are absent.

6. A Misalliance, London: Jonathan Cape, 1986
Blanche Vernon occupied her time most usefully in keeping feelings at bay.

7. A Friend from England, London: Jonathan Cape, 1987
I first got to know Oscar Livingstone in fairly humdrum circumstances.

8. Latecomers, London: Jonathan Cape, 1988
Hartmann, a voluptuary, lowered a spoonful of brown sugar crystals into his coffee cup, then placed a square of bitter chocolate on his tongue, and, while it was dissolving, lit his first cigarette.

9. Lewis Percy, London: Jonathan Cape, 1989
Madame Doche, with an air of appreciation no less generous for being regularly at her command, took the camembert from Lewis Percy, prodded it with an expert thumb, pronounced it to be good, and ushered him into the salon.

10. Brief Lives, London: Jonathan Cape, 1990
Julia died.

11. A Closed Eye, London: Jonathan Cape, 1991
'My dear Lizzie', (she wrote),

12. Fraud, London: Jonathan Cape, 1992
The facts, as far as they could be ascertained, were as follows.

13. A Family Romance, London: Jonathan Cape, 1993; (Dolly in the US)
I thought of her as the aunt rather than as my aunt, for anything more intimate would have implied appropriation, or attachment.

14. A Private View, London: Jonathan Cape, 1994
George Bland, in the sun, reflected that now was the moment to take stock.

15. Incidents in the Rue Laugier, London: Jonathan Cape, 1995
My mother read a lot, sighed a lot, and went to bed early.

16. Altered States, London: Jonathan Cape, 1996
The woman on the station platform had her back to me.

17. Visitors, London: Jonathan Cape, 1997
Towards evening the oppressive heat was tempered by a slight breeze, although this merely served to power drifts and eddies of a warmth almost tropical in its intensity.

18. Falling Slowly, London: Viking, 1998
On her way to the London Library, Mrs Eldon, who still thought of herself as Miriam Sharpe, paused as usual to examine the pictures in the windows of the Duke Street galleries.

19. Undue Influence, London: Viking, 1999
It is my conviction that everyone is profoundly eccentric.

20. The Bay of Angels, London: Viking, 2001
I read the Blue Fairy Book, the Yellow Fairy Book, and the stories of Hans Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Charles Perrault.

21. The Next Big Thing, London: Viking, 2002; (Making Things Better in the US)
Herz had a dream which, when he awoke into a night that was still black, left him excited and impressed.

22. The Rules of Engagement, London: Viking, 2003
We met, and became friends of a sort, by virtue of the fact that we started school on the same day.

23. Leaving Home, London: Viking, 2005
Argh! I've lent it to a friend... !

Eureka?

2008-06-04T19:22:00.008+10:00

Suddenly things are falling into place but I'm scared to get too excited because I've still got a long way to go. Clara generously shared an essay she's nearly completed which provides a way to read dandy narratives and this has been hugely instructive. Why isn't there more writing like this? Her piece is a map to a new world but at least I'm in the right maze now.

Brief Lives has been the hardest of all of Brookner's novels to crack. It's a very full book and it seems so compact in a sense it's hard to get some leverage in there. I gave up on it a couple of years ago because I just couldn't get it. The book remained a whole. It defeated me. I felt like I wasted a year on it and I was worried that it would sour the whole project for me. The lesson? Give up earlier. But it was more perplexing than anything. I guess I maintained a grudging respect for something that totally whipped my arse. Which at the same time seemed so benign. It's funny battling with an inanimate object, stupid book. It reminds me of my own childhood strategy for arguing with my sister: be very still.

Now I think I might be coming to the table with something new to offer. There's maybe been five times during this thesis writing that I've felt the thrill of possibility and i don't quite feel it yet. In my experience with the other novels (A Friend from England, A Misalliance, Falling Slowly and Undue Influence) something opens up and then a number of alarming coincidences present themselves almost like a joke. Leads end up with gods on the end and things just feel so right it's like its own little language is unfolding. The feeling is like Brookner knew this all along and I have finally come to the party but then again her own comments on the unconscious and the creative process suggest a fairly mediated experience of knowledge anyway. I don't know, it's odd but it's the ultimate part of the experience.

Deadlines

2008-05-30T07:11:00.000+10:00

When did I decide that deadlines weren't for me? After failing to meet a number of self-imposed deadlines - okay my submission date - I seemed to have written off the concept altogether. In fact I recall instructing a friend that this sort of work wasn't conducive to meeting deadlines. The combination of unrealistic expectations, pessimism and escapist tendencies has often mitigated against functionality. How do you draw up a timetable which allows for the fact that 2 paragraphs will take 5 weeks and then factor that into a convalescent word count and a looming completion report? Giving up deadlines was actually a practical solution.

But there's only so much housework that will substitute for a sense of achievement and the Literature and History conference July 24 - 25 is prying me away from the toilet bowl. The substance of my paper (performative Romanticism, Brief Lives (1990) and The Dandy) corresponds to the second half of the chapter that i'm working on (Chapter One). I've nearly finished the first half of the chapter but I could see myself taking another 2 weeks to pull it together. That's probably not the smartest use of my time. Perhaps I should break with tradition and get serious about taming this new material. I've already written about 4000 words introducing my stance on BL and The Dandy. I should be able to hit the deck running. I need a realistic plan.

Here's some dates:
Friday May 30: Today
Friday June 6: Submit new abstract ie reduce current abstract from 300 words to 250 words
Friday June 27: Submit chapter draft to Clara. (4 weeks out from today)
Tuesday July 8: Meeting with Clara / Start paper (5 weeks out)
Friday July 18: Finish paper (7 weeks out)
Wednesday July 23: Arrive Sydney
Thursday July 24 - 25: Literature and History Conference (8 weeks out)

In the short term I need to:
Establish my intertexts for The Dandy
Establish which texts I'll be using to read the intertexts
Establish how i'll be reading them in the context of Brief Lives
Reach a conclusion

The Brookner Walks Project

2008-05-24T21:00:00.000+10:00

Brooknerines are walking protagonists. That is, the main protagonist of a Brookner novel usually embraces walking as a personal practice. For the Brooknerine, walking is a mode of transport, a form of physical exercise and a way of passing time. It has therapeutical benefits; it makes no mental demands on the walker but can stimulate thought and bring clarity. Walking allows the subject to observe the world and participate in public space while simultaneously being a solitary practice. Walking locates the Brooknerine in a contemporary chronotope (time / space context). However it is also a mnemonic experience. Walking prompts the subject to recall past narratives at the same time as creating a new imprint on the city. In the nineteenth-century, the peripatetic flâneur was the city's muse and one of modernity's poetic subjects. The Brooknerine is part flâneuse. In Chapter Six of my thesis I read the figure of the flâneur in Brookner's nineteenth novel Undue Influence (1999). The main protagonist Claire Pitt is editing a book entitled Walks with Myself and in Undue Influence there are both implicit and explicit intertextual allusions to the Baudelairean flâneur.

The path of the walker generates a map of the city for the reader. The Brookner Walks Project aims to create walks from Brookner's novels that the reader can follow. Walking tours are popular in major cities and literary walking tours form a significant aspect of this genre. From A Journey through Dickens London to The London Walks of Mrs Dalloway, readers can physically trace the movement of fictional characters through physical space. Literary walks sponsor an intersection of the fictional and the real which create a unique experience for the reader.

Currently I have posted photos of a walk from Undue Influence (1999) at Flickr. I have a version of a walk from Brief Lives (1990) marked in google maps.

Problem

2008-05-24T20:52:00.001+10:00

In the last 6 months I've been solving both new and old problems of theory, structure and expression in the thesis. But one big problem remains and that concerns how to integrate the work i've done on the paratext with the individual interpretations of Brookner's novels. This week i've had a new lead on how this might be accomplished. I worked on it more or less unsuccessfully for a few days, becoming irritable, frustrated and disillusioned. On Thursday afternoon I printed out 10 pages to work on in a local cafe, thinking a change of scene might help. I chose a cafe I don't normally visit so I wouldn't be distracted by having to smile. I ordered a coffee and realised i was in the midst of a throbbing bar scene: the music too loud, the lights too low, the patrons too excitable. There was a disco ball turning for chrissakes. I wished I was younger, slid my printouts into my bag and headed back via my sister's house where i accepted a glass of wine. I got home 11 hours later. So yesterday I was hungover. Today I'm reunited with the problem. Sometimes a hangover can clear the deck. It reminds me of Davy Warbeck's diet in Love and a Cold Climate. He scheduled days for bingeing to strengthen his constitution by putting his body through various extremes. Yes, it's very smart. I'm also going to clear my desk and take to the printout with scissors. I want to be able to physically move the text around and get a more visual sense of what's going on.

My PhD

2008-05-24T19:17:00.000+10:00

Introduction

Chapter One: Brookner Reading Formations
i) Reading Formations and Brief Lives (1990)
Feminocentric and anti-essentialist readings
Transitioning to the Performative
ii) Performative Romanticism, Brief Lives (1990) and The Dandy
Nineteenth century narratives and the Brookner intertext

Chapter Two: The Brookner Paratext: chronotopic conflict in literary marketplace
i) the book review
ii) the author interview

Chapter Three: A Friend from England (1987) and The Queer

Chapter Four: A Misalliance (1986) and The Aesthete

Chapter Five: Falling Slowly (1998) and The New Woman

Chapter Six: Undue Influence (1999) and The Flaneur

Conclusion

Conference abstract

2008-05-20T00:55:00.000+10:00

This is my proposal for the Literature and History conference in Sydney in July. I found out it was accepted last week. Woohoo! Then i thought, shit, that's a whole lot of extra work to do. It concerns material that overlaps with the chapter I'm currently working on, so I'm hoping that thinking of the subject matter in terms of two different mediums might help clarify my ideas.

I have to reduce this abstract to 250 words by June 6th.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is it possible to read a contemporary novel as a 19th century novel?
Anita Brookner , “Performative Romanticism”, The Dandy and Brief Lives (1990)

It has long been maintained that Anita Brookner is the world’s most boring novelist. This stereotype has developed in the absence of a method of interpretation which addresses the intertextual relationship between nineteenth-century narratives, Brookner’s critical oeuvre as a Romantic art historian and her contemporary novels. I argue that a number of contemporary and historical discourses can be discerned in Brookner’s novels. When read purely as contemporary fiction, significant elements are obscured. Is it possible to read contemporary novels as nineteenth-century texts?

In Romanticism and its Discontents (2000), Brookner stated “Romanticism is about behaviour, it is therefore recognisable” (RD, 2). In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler repeatedly discussed “acts, gestures and desire” (GT, 136) as central to understanding the gender performance of the historical subject. While Butler’s theory of performativity is useful for discussing how the synchronic, historical subject is discursively constituted, genres of literary representation operate according to aesthetic as opposed to empirical laws. Therefore literary subjects can be thought of as diachronic subjects or subjects who are discursively constituted from narratives across temporal periods. In this paper I discuss how a method of interpretation called “performative Romanticism” addresses the hermeneutical impasse resulting from the implosion of historical and literary genres.

I demonstrate the use and application of performative Romanticism through a reading of the figure of the 19th century dandy in Brookner’s Brief Lives (1990). I examine how the dandy is produced figuratively and literally in 19th century texts and their contemporary readings. I show how the narrative formations known as “the dandy” are subsequently theorised in textual interpretations. I describe how the figure of the dandy emerges in Brief Lives and suggest ways in which it can be interpreted. Finally I discuss the implications of performative Romanticism for the relationship between literature, history and criticism.

Brookner Bibliography

2008-05-19T20:27:00.000+10:00

I aim to compile a complete bibliography of critical writing on the work of Anita Brookner. Please email me petamayer@gmail.com if you know of any references that i should add to this list.

Books

Sadler, Lynn Veach. Anita Brookner. Boston : Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Basingstoke, Hampshire : Macmillan, 1992.

Bjorkblom, Inger. The Plane of Uncreatedness: A Phenomenological Study of Anita Brookner's Late Fiction. (Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Stockholm Studies in English, 93) English publication: Almquiest & Wiksell Intl., 2001.

Malcolm Alexander, Cheryl. Understanding Anita Brookner. South Caroline: Univeristy of South Carolina Press, 2002.

Williams-Wanquet, Eileen. Art and Life in the Novels of Anita Brookner: Reading for Life, Subversive Re-writing to Live Bern: Peter Lang, 2004.

Articles in Books

Kenyon, Olga. “Anita Brookner: The Woman’s Novel” in Women Novelists Today: A Survey of English Writing in the Seventies and Eighties. Brighton, Sussex : Harvester, 1988.

Stetz, Margaret Diane. “Anita Brookner: Woman Writer as Reluctant Feminist” in Writing the woman artist : essays on poetics, politics, and portraiture ed Suzanne W. Jones. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

Hosmer, Robert E. Jnr “Paradigm and Passage: The Fiction of Anita Brookner” in Contemporary British Women Writers: Texts and Strategies ed. Robert E. Hosmer Jnr Basingstoke : Macmillan, 1993.

Watson, Daphne. "Manners Makyth (Wo)Man: The Novels of Anita Brookner and Barbara Pym" Their Own Worst Enemies: Women Writers of Women's Fiction Daphne Watson. London ; Boulder, Colo. : Pluto Press, 1995.

Joannou, Mary. 'Essentially Virtuous?: Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac' in Fatal attractions : re-scripting romance in contemporary literature and filmed Lynne Pearce and Gina Wisker Published Sterling, VA : Pluto Press, 1998.

Button, Marilyn Demarest. “A Losing Tradition: The Exotic Female of Anita Brookner’s Early Fiction” in The Foreign Woman in British Literature: Exotics, Aliens and Outsiders” ed Marilyn Demarest Button and Toni Reed Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press Contributions in Women’s Studies, Number 171, 1999

"Anita Brookner" Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive guide to Jewish writers and writing ed. Sorrel Kerbel ?:Routledge, 2003.

Malcolm Alexander, Cheryl. "Anita Brookner” A Companion to the British and Irish novel 1945-2000 ed. Brian W. Shaffer. Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., 2005.

Interviews with Anita Brookner

Novelists in interview ed. John Haffenden. London ; New York : Methuen, 1985.

Women writers talk : interviews with 10 women writers ed. Olga Kenyon. Oxford : Lennard, 1989.

Shusha Guppy “The secret sharer: an interview with Anita Brookner” World and I, July 1998 v13 n7 p282

Journal Articles

MacLaine, Brent. 'Photofiction as Family Album: David Galloway, Paul Theroux and Anita Brookner' Mosaic Spring 1991 v24 n2 p131(19)

Baxter, Gisele Marie. 'Clothes, Men and Books: Cultural Experiences and Identity in the Early Novels of Anita Brookner' English 42, Summer 1993 125-139

Galef, David. 'You Aren’t What You Eat: Anita Brookner’s dilemma' Journal of Popular Culture; Winter 1994; 28, 3.

Bowen, Deborah. 'Preserving Appearances: photography and the postmodern realism of Anita Brookner' Mosaic June 1995 v28 n2 p123

Fisher-Wirth, Ann. 'Hunger art: the novels of Anita Brookner' Twentieth Century Literature Spring 1995 Vol. 41, Iss.1 pg 1

Restuccia, Frances. 'Tales of Beauty: Aestheticising Female Melancholia' American Imago 53.4 (1996) 353-383

Giobbi, Guiliana. "‘No bread will feed my hungry soul’: anorexic heroines in female fiction- from the example of Emily Bronte as mirrored by Anita Brookner, Gianna Schelotto and Alessandra Arachi" Journal of European Studies xxvii (1997), 73-92

Usandizaga, Aranzuzu. "The female Bildungsroman at the fin de siecle: the “utopian imperative” in Anita Brookner’s ‘A Closed Eye’ and ‘Fraud’" Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Summer 1998 v39 n4 p325

Marsh, Kelly A. 'Contextualising Bridget Jones' College Literature Winter 2004 Vol.31, Iss 1, pg 52

Journal Articles Online

Giobbi, Guiliana. 'Blood Ties: a Case-Study of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Anita Brookner, Sara Maitland and Rosetta Loy'Deep South v.1 n.3 (Spring, 1995)

Soule, George. 'New Visions from Old: Three Recent Novels from Anita Brookner' This essay is based on material that first appeared in the Magill's Literary Annual, 1998, Magill's Literary Annual, 1999, and Magill's Literary Annual, 2000. All were published in Pasadena, CA, by the Salem Press

Wanquet, Eileen. 'Brookner's A Closed Eye as a re-working of Byatt's The July Ghost' Oracle Universite de la Reunion, 2004

Walia, Rajni. 'Women and Self: Fictions of Jean Rhys, Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner' Quodlibet: The Australian Journal of Trans-National Writing Vol 1, March 2005

Brookner's Novels

2008-05-19T20:24:00.002+10:00

Anita Brookner has written 24 novels:

A Start in Life, London: Jonathan Cape, 1981 (The Debut in the US)
Reader review from bookcrossing.com
The full text of A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac from Project Gutenberg
Providence, London: Jonathan Cape, 1982
Synopses and reviews from powells.com
Look at Me, London: Jonathan Cape, 1983
Reader reviews from amazon.com
Hotel du Lac, London: Jonathan Cape, 1984
Review from brothersjudd.com
Family and Friends, London: Jonathan Cape, 1985
Reader reviews from amazon.com
A Misalliance, London: Jonathan Cape, 1986
Reader reviews from amazon.com
A Friend from England, London: Jonathan Cape, 1987
Editorial reviews from amazon.com
Latecomers, London: Jonathan Cape, 1988
Synopses and reviews from powells.com
Lewis Percy, London: Jonathan Cape, 1989
Reader reviews from amazon.com
Brief Lives, London: Jonathan Cape, 1990
from The Virginia Quarterly Review- Notes on Current Books, Winter 1992
A Closed Eye, London: Jonathan Cape, 1991
Synopses and reviews from powells.com
Fraud, London: Jonathan Cape, 1992
Reviewed by Kathleen Hickey at eye.net
A Family Romance, London: Jonathan Cape, 1993; (Dolly in the US)
Editorial review at amazon.com
A Private View, London: Jonathan Cape, 1994
Review from allreaders.com
Incidents in the Rue Laugier, London: Jonathan Cape, 1995
Review by Carol Ratelle Leach at bookpage.com
Altered States, London: Jonathan Cape, 1996
Review by Sylvia Sachs at post-gazette.com "A Solitary Life, Filled with Regrets"
Visitors, London: Jonathan Cape, 1997
New York Times review
Falling Slowly, London: Viking, 1998
Review by Patty Housman at bookpage.com
Undue Influence, London: Viking, 1999
Review by Robert Whitehouse at the Richmond Review
The Bay of Angels, London: Viking, 2001
Kate Kellaway's review at The Guardian "Those Happy Endings"
The Next Big Thing, London: Viking, 2002; (Making Things Better in the US)
Dinah Birch's review from the London Review of Books "Wintry Lessons"
The Rules of Engagement, London: Viking, 2003
Review by Rebecca J Davies at the Sydney Morning Herald
Leaving Home, London: Viking, 2005
Review by Maureen Freely at The Guardian "Family Matters"
Strangers, London: Fig Tree, 2009
Review by Sebastian Smee at The Spectator "Strangers"

My papers on Brookner

2008-05-19T19:42:00.000+10:00

2008
Upcoming paper:
Is it possible to read a contemporary novel as a 19th century novel?
Anita Brookner , “Performative Romanticism”, The Dandy and Brief Lives (1990).
Literature and History 2nd Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Literature 24-25 July, 2008 Macquarie University Sydney, Australia.

2006
"The Paratextual Construction of Anita Brookner: Chronotopic Conflict in the Book Review and Author Interview."
For Love or Money? Contemporary Women's Fiction in the Marketplace, University of Bangor, Wales.
A copy of the paper is available here.

2004
1. "The Flaneur as Romantic Peripeteia in Anita Brookner's Undue Influence"
The Literary London Conference. I also presented this paper at the postgraduate seminar series in the Department of Culture & Communications, University of Melbourne.
2. "Performative Romanticism in Anita Brookner's A Friend from England"
King's College, University of London
3. "New interpretations of Anita Brookner"
UK Network for Fiction, University of Westminster

Images of Anita Brookner

2008-05-19T19:37:00.000+10:00

Interview with Anita Brookner, 4 September 1985

With Hermoine Lee for the B.B.C. program "Book Four”. I took these photos while viewing a recording of the interview at the British Film Institute, May 2006.

Images of the author available to order online from The National Portrait Gallery.