Harry Ransom CenterThe University of Texas at Austin

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Anita Brookner, 1928-
Notebooks, ca. 1986-1994

2 boxes (.63 linear feet)

Acquisition: Purchase, 1995 (R13385)
Access: Open for research
Processed by: Katherine Mosley, 2007
RLIN Record ID: TXRC07-A1

Table of Contents

Biographical Sketch
Scope and Contents
Folder List

Biographical Sketch

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 continues to live in London. She is a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge, and was made a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 1990.

Sources:

British Council Contemporary Writers in the UK website, http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth39 (accessed 14 March 2007).

Contemporary Literary Criticism, http://www.galenetgroup.com (accessed 14 March 2007).

Contemporary Authors Online, http://www.galenetgroup.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.

Folder List

Box	Folder	Description

Series I. Notebooks, ca. 1986-1994

		A Closed Eye (1991)--see folder 1.7
		A Family Romance (1993)
1	1		Handwritten notes and draft, in notebook
	2-6		Handwritten draft, in five notebooks
		Fraud (1992)
	7		Handwritten notes and incomplete draft, in
					notebook. Also in notebook: handwritten
					notes and draft fragment of A Closed Eye;
					and handwritten drafts of reviews of
					Roger's Version (1986) by John Updike;
					The Suzy Lamplugh Story (1988) by Andrew
					Stephen; Cat's Eye (1988) by Margaret
					Atwood; Remembrance of Things Past
					(1913-1927) by Marcel Proust; The Summer
					House: A Trilogy (1994) by Alice Thomas
					Ellis; and Falling (1989) by Colin Thubron
	8		Handwritten incomplete draft, in notebook
		Latecomers (1988)--see folder 2.1

		Lewis Percy (1989)
2	1		Handwritten notes and incomplete draft, in
					notebook. Also in notebook: handwritten
					notes and draft fragments of Latecomers,
					and handwritten draft of review of
					unidentified book of interviews with women
	2	 	Handwritten incomplete draft, in notebook. Also
					in notebook: handwritten drafts of reviews
					of Fields of Vision: Essays on Literature,
					Language, and Television (1988) by D. J.
					Enright; Ghosts in the Mirror (1988) by
					Alain Robbe-Grillet; L'Exposition Coloniale
					(1988) by Erik Orsenna; La Gare de Wannsee
					(1988) by François-Olivier Rousseau; and Le
					Zébre (1988) by Alexandre Jardin

Anita Brookner Notebooks Finding Aid
(Last modified: 23 March 2007 )

Reference queries to: reference@hrc.utexas.edu

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