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 *

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. In 2024, she was made a Dame Grand Cross (GBE) for services to literary scholarship and literature.

She lives in Oxford.

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