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Anita Brookner
  • Published: 1 December 2026
  • ISBN: 9781784744687
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 544
  • RRP: $65.00

Anita Brookner

Art and Life

Formats & editions
Hardback
1 Dec 2026
EBook
10 Sept 2026
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The groundbreaking biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers.

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

Born in south London in 1928, Brookner came from a family of middle-class, Polish-Jewish immigrants. Her parents were anxious and unhappy. Until she was well into her thirties, she nursed her invalid mother with a painful mixture of love and resentment. She would have liked a marriage and children; instead, she lived alone and became a great writer of solitude, self-knowledge and survival.

For many years she worked at the Courtauld Institute, teaching French Romanticism in art, and influencing generations of students. In her fifties she began to write fiction: her first novel was the wryly titled A Start in Life. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac; after that, a novel appeared almost every year until her eighties.

In her lifetime Brookner was seen as an object of wonder and fascination. She was a formidable and inspiring teacher, an enormously knowledgeable, witty and perceptive art historian and critic, and a novelist like no other. Her extraordinary fictions of heroic solitude, romantic passion, longing and lethal social comedy, written with elegance and impeccable control, gained her a devoted following. But she also attracted hostility and bafflement, often from readers challenged by the unsentimental realism of her fierce, strange and moving books.
  • Published: 1 December 2026
  • ISBN: 9781784744687
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 544
  • RRP: $65.00
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About the author

Hermione Lee

HERMIONE LEE is a biographer, Professor Emeritus of English Literature and former President of Wolfson College, Oxford. Her writings include biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013) and Tom Stoppard (2020). She is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and in 2024 was made a Dame Grand Cross (GBE) for services to literary scholarship and literature. She lives in Oxford.
portrait photo of Hermione Lee

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Praise for Anita Brookner

‘A rich and fascinating book, beautifully written, which grasps the contradictions of Brookner’s character and work’

Tessa Hadley, author of THE PARTY

Tremendous… In some ways, Lee’s biography is the exact opposite of a Brookner novel. It has joie de vivre, high humour and energetic compassion for the multiplying complexities of the human mind. It would be hard to think of a better biographer for this uniquely contradictory intellectual

Observer

Lee…presents Brookner as daring, funny and decisive… [Brookner] surely have recognized the quality of this delicate, judicious and thorough portrait of such a contradictory, uneven, idiosyncratic person

Independent

Lee offers genuinely transporting literary criticism, unearthing the elegance and complexity of the work… This astute and tireless biography succeeds, against the odds, in unearthing the author

Guardian

[A] thoroughly absorbing and beguiling biography…surely the woman [Brookner] herself might grudgingly approve

Spectator

Hermione Lee has written a wonderful biography, fond but not foolish. Her rigour means that she never simply equates the novelist’s heroines with their creator but offers instead a set of nuanced readings show the ways in which art and life were engaged in a constant dialogue

Literary Review

One emerges from Lee’s biography deeply moved, as much by her heroic scholarly endeavour as by the formidable woman she seeks to uncover. It’s not hard to see why Brookner is finding a new audience among a generation of women choosing...a solitary life

Sunday Times

Exhaustively researched, psychologically penetrating, and deeply empathetic, this, the first biography of Brookner, brings us to fully understand the brilliant, complex and fascinating person that she was. And the result is magnificent

Daily Telegraph

Between the silences, secrets and equivocations emerges a gripping and illuminating portrait of a life dedicated to its art. One likes to think that while she might not have fully approved, Brookner would nevertheless admire the result

Financial Times

An extraordinary novelist needs an exceptional biographer; only Hermione Lee can do Anita Brookner justice

Tessa Hadley, New Statesman

The great engine of Lee's empathetic power as a biographer is that she can make you see, from one end of her subject's life to the other, the absolute value of that romantic impulse. In Brookner she finds, as much as she found in Virginia Woolf or Edith Wharton, a font of ‘desire and longing, ideal standards and painful disappointment', such as can make a lifelong narrative… the stuff of pure biography

London Review of Books