An Inventory of Her Notebooks at the Harry Ransom Center
Creator:
Brookner, Anita, 1928-2016
Title:
Anita Brookner Notebooks
Dates:
Circa 1986-1994
Extent:
2 boxes (.63 linear feet)
Abstract:
The papers of Anita Brookner consist of ten
notebooks containing untitled drafts of her novels and reviews. The notebooks are
undated
but appear to date from about 1986 to 1994.
Novelist and art historian Anita Brookner was born in Herne Hill, a suburb of London,
England, on July 16, 1928. Her father, Newson Bruckner, was a Polish immigrant, and
her
mother, Maude Schiska, was a singer whose father had immigrated from Poland and founded
a
tobacco factory. Maude changed their surname to Brookner due to anti-German sentiment
in
England. Anita Brookner had a lonely childhood, although her grandmother and uncle
lived
with the family, and her parents, nonreligious Jews, opened their house to Jewish
refugees
during the 1930s and World War II. Brookner, an only child, never married and took
care of
her parents as they aged. Her personal history influenced her first novel, A Start in Life, which she published in 1981 at the age of
fifty-three. She continued to write, producing a novel every year or so. Her fourth
novel,
Hotel du Lac (1984), won the Booker Prize for Fiction and was
adapted for television in 1986. Brookner is highly regarded as a stylist, and her
novels
typically depict intellectual, middle-aged women who suffer emotional loss and isolation,
especially disappointment in romantic love.
Brookner received a B.A. in history from King’s College in 1949 and a doctorate in
art
history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1953. Her specialty was late eighteenth-century
and early nineteenth-century French art, and she studied the art of Jean-Baptiste
Greuze in
Paris on a French government scholarship for three years. She began her distinguished
career
teaching art history as a lecturer at the University of Reading in 1959. In 1964,
she
returned to the Courtauld, where she was promoted to reader in 1977 and taught until
her
retirement in 1988. From 1967 to 1968 she was the first female Slade Professor of
Art at
Cambridge University. Her first book, J. A. Dominique Ingres, was
published in 1965, and her subsequent art history books are as well-regarded as her
works of
fiction. In addition to her careers as a novelist and art historian, Brookner has
worked as
a critic and began reviewing fiction for The Spectator in 1986.
Anita Brookner was made a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 1990. She died
on March
10, 2016.
Sources:
British Council Contemporary Writers in the UK website,
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth19 (accessed 14 March 2007).
Contemporary Literary Criticism, http://www.galegroup.com/ (accessed
14 March 2007).
Contemporary Authors Online, http://www.galegroup.com/ (accessed 14
March 2007).
Fullbrook, Kate. “Anita Brookner.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume
194: British Novelists Since 1960, Second Series. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998.
McCrum, Robert. "Just Don’t Mention Jane Austen,"The Observer, 28 January 2001,
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,429694,00.html
(accessed
16 March 2007)
Scope and Contents
The papers of Anita Brookner consist of ten notebooks containing untitled drafts of
her
novels and reviews. The notebooks are undated but appear to date from about 1986 to
1994.
As a novelist, Brookner writes a first draft by hand, with little revision, and then
types
a subsequent draft. Handwritten drafts of her novels A Closed Eye (1991), A Family Romance (1993), Fraud (1992), Latecomers (1988), and Lewis Percy (1989) are present. The notebooks for Fraud and Lewis Percy also contain drafts
of Brookner’s reviews of works by authors Margaret Atwood, Alice Thomas Ellis, D.
J.
Enright, Alexandre Jardin, Erik Orsenna, Marcel Proust, Andrew Stephen, Alain Robbe-Grillet,
François-Olivier Rousseau, Colin Thubron, and John Updike.
