Hermione Lee on Anita Brookner
Anita Brookner: Art and Life
Anita Brookner is famous for her quiet, incisive studies of solitary and emotionally restrained characters—often middle-class women—navigating loneliness, disappointment, and small eruptions of desire beneath a façade of reserve. She is so closely associated with these protagonists, in fact, that many people imagine the author herself as a woman in a long gray cardigan, gazing out the window of a bleak London flat or onto the misty waters of a Swiss lake, yearning for an absent or unreliable lover. Yet as Hermione Lee demonstrates in her captivating and absorbing biography, Brookner the writer was the inventor of those lonely women, not their alter ego.
Brookner herself was formidable, witty, elegant, precise, and controlled. Her life was full of contradictions. She was for many years a much-admired art historian and teacher. She was the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge. Her first novel, ironically entitled A Start in Life, was published at the age of fifty-three. A Booker Prize followed soon after for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, and then her reputation as one of Britain’s leading novelists was established. At her death in 2016, she left behind twenty-five novels, several volumes of art history, and a wealth of criticism. But very few personal papers survived. She was a private person who wanted to keep herself hidden and to remain enigmatic. Now, in Hermione Lee’s book, Brookner’s character is revealed to us. This luminous portrait seamlessly weaves life and work into a vivid, insightful, and riveting narrative that sheds a penetrating light on a writer—and woman—like no other.
Editions
Anita Brookner: Art and Life. Chatto & Windus, 2026. ISBN: 9781784744687
Anita Brookner: Art and Life. Alfred A. Knopf, 2026. ISBN: 9780593321508
Reviews
“Majestic. ... [Dives] into Brookner’s life and times, her prolific critical writings and fiction, with energy and insight. ... A deeply researched, empathetic portrayal.” — Kirkus Reviews [starred review]
“Masterful. ... Lee delivers a captivating reevaluation of a singular and enigmatic novelist.” — Publishers Weekly [starred review]
26 August 2026 - Laura Cumming, "In search of Anita Brookner." The Observer. ["Hermione Lee unravels the knotty life of the novelist and art historian – doing her the service of leaving all her mystery intact."]
1 September 2026 - Lucy Atkins, "An Enigmatic Literary Great Given Her Due." The Guardian. ["This astute and tireless biography succeeds, against the odds, in unearthing the author – who would be appalled by our scrutiny." ]
September 2026 - Kathryn Hughes, "Spiky, Sharp, Cool." Literary Review. ["Lee has done an excellent job of filling in the cobwebby gaps her evasive subject left behind."]
September 2026 - Johanna Thomas-Corr, "The life of Anita Brookner, the ‘aloof spinster’ who wrote Hotel du Lac." Sunday Times.
September 2026 - Andy Miller, "Few writers have covered their tracks as successfully as Anita Brookner." The Spectator.
8 September 2026 - Lucy Scholes, "Anita Brookner — a beguiling portrait of a maddeningly inscrutable writer." The Financial Times. ["Hermione Lee’s exhilarating biography pieces together the elusive life of a novelist who turned privacy into an art form and herself into a character."]
12 September 2026 - Mick Brown, "The tortured genius of Anita Brookner, ‘the world’s loneliest woman’." Telegraph.
12 September 2026 - John Self, "A Loving, Careful and Worthwhile Biography of an Evasive Life." Irish Times.
16 September 2026 - Tessa Hadley, "Anita Brookner’s view from the outside." New Statesman. ["An extraordinary novelist needs an exceptional biographer; only Hermione Lee can do Anita Brookner justice."]
24 September 2026 - Andrew O'Hagan, "Omelettes and Whisky." London Review of Books, vol. 48, no. 17. ["Before this biography, the name ‘Brookner’ probably brought to mind a succession of solitary women pining for love while waiting for death, an image that critics were quick to attach to the author of these women. Yet in Hermione Lee’s book we enter the life and work of someone else, a woman who was ‘dandyish, witty, controlled’, and who often sought in the shade what other writers may seek in the sunny uplands of a social group."]
Hermione Lee Remembers Anita Brookner
"Remembering Anita Brookner: Hermione Lee on the Writer Behind Hotel du Lac." Penguin.co.uk, 10 March 2026. [On the tenth anniversary of Brookner’s death, Hermione Lee reflects on the novelist’s mystery, wit, and emotional courage—ahead of her forthcoming biography from Chatto & Windus.]