Anita Brookner: Art & Life by Hermione Lee – A loving, careful and worthwhile biography of an evasive life

“I have no private papers,” the English novelist Anita Brookner told an interviewer in 1995. “I shall leave no trace. That’s the ideal.” Appearing early in Hermione Lee’s biographer of Brookner, this quotation reads like a shot across the bows of the reader, alongside a quote from Brookner’s novel from the same year, Incidents in the Rue Laugier, which appears here as an epigraph: “The dead, perhaps even more than the living, have a right to their mysteries.”

Don’t expect big revelations, Lee seems to be saying. For the close observer, this was obvious even before opening the book, from its size: fitting the life into 450 pages (plus appendices), it’s half the length of Lee’s biographies of Tom Stoppard and Virginia Woolf. What is there to say about a writer who, it seems, spent her time teaching, then writing, lived alone and travelled little?

The trace that Brookner – who was born in 1928 and died in 2016 – did leave is in the books: as well as works as an art historian, she wrote 24 novels, mostly published at yearly intervals. If it hadn’t been for her winning the Booker Prize in 1984 with her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, she would probably be even more of a minor interest than she is: according to her agent, Bill Hamilton, most of her books sell “very few indeed: between 20 and 80 a year”.

If Brookner’s life was – to adopt the phrase of Philip Larkin’s biographer Andrew Motion – not “much diversified by event”, that matches the popular perception of her novels. They were, goes this misreading, dull and quiet and unambitious. Even her Booker winner was controversial: it was “an unexpected choice”, said Melvyn Bragg, who hosted the TV coverage of the prize that year. The book was “insipid”, said Jeanette Winterson, and its win “typical of the way the establishment … rewarded women who are compliant”.

Lee’s job is not just to tell the life but to rehabilitate the work. Not that this is necessary for anyone who has read Brookner’s work with any care. Brookner is “a deeply romantic and passionate writer,” says Lee, “whose armour is an austere, controlled manner, a dry, often formal vocabulary and a scathing wit”.

In her analysis of her characters’ thoughts, there is a Jamesian depth of qualified emotion as well as a cool detachment and analytical rigour more reminiscent of European modernism than much traditional English literary fiction. The books had recurring motifs, which she was well aware of. She would tell her friend Julian Barnes, over their annual lunch, that she had just written a new book. Dropping her voice, she would add, “It’s about … a lonely woman.”

The rich understanding of people’s passions – those of lonely women and others – that her novels exhibit may have been sharpened by the way Brookner preferred, in life, to observe them from a distance rather than get too close.

Stories of her unique way of putting herself about in the world – not so much antisocial as asocial – abound in Lee’s account. One comes from her own experience, when Lee attended the Times Literary Supplement party and chatted to Brookner for a few minutes as they made their way in. Very soon after, Brookner came out again. “But Anita, you’ve only been here for five minutes!” cried Lee. “To which she replied, with perfect courtesy, ‘And I’m so glad that three of them were spent with you’.”

Anita Brookner: Author of elegiac novels labelled the ‘mistress of gloom’

Hilary Mantel had a similar experience: “I saw her ‘attend’ the Spectator party by walking in at the front door, down to the end of the garden – smiling guardedly and nodding – and walking back – and out again.” To Julian Barnes she wrote, “I put in my usual ten minutes at the Spectator party but failed to see you there, no doubt for that reason.”

Brookner’s background was from a family of Polish Jews, and Jewish exiles feature in some of her best books, including Family and Friends (1985), Latecomers (1988) and The Next Big Thing (2002). Her father, who came to England in 1908 aged 16, changed the family named from Bruckner to Brookner, which his daughter later observed, with typical dry wit, was “like calling yourself Batehoven”.

She didn’t make it easy for her future biographer even in her youth, throwing away childhood photos, “wishing to silence the ‘clamorous voices’ they evoked”. At school she was “one of the brainy ones”, which was more a curse than a blessing: her mother, she told her friend Carmen Callil in a rare moment of self-exposure, “wanted me to be another kind of person altogether. I should have looked different, should have been more popular, socially more graceful, one of those small, coy, kittenish women who get their way”.

Her manner of getting her own way was to exert absolute control over her life, by letting few people get close. She never married, and Lee has been unable to uncover firm evidence of any romantic relationships, though she does her best to speculate about possible paramours.

The publisher Christopher MacLehose, for example, discounts any suggestion that he was the model for the charismatic lover of the heroine in Brookner’s 1982 novel Providence. The strongest evidence we get is that she told several friends that in the 1980s she and the Jewish philanthropist and property tycoon Max Rayne were lovers. “He fucked like a navvy,” she told one friend, in a distinctly un-Brooknerian cadence.

Before she became a novelist, Brookner was a highly respected art historian at the Courtauld Institute in London, where she worked with Anthony Blunt, who was subsequently disgraced when unveiled as a Soviet spy. His exposure left Brookner “shaking” with “absolute outrage”. Before that she lived for a time in Paris, but once again Lee is stymied.

“What happened to the young Anita Brookner, set free in Paris, city of possibilities? It’s a mystery.” Whatever it was, it informed her work: repeatedly in her novels we come across characters who think longingly of a period of youth in Paris, and struggle against the strictures of life back at home.

Back home for Brookner, for most of her life, was flat number 6 at 68 Elm Park Gardens in Chelsea, London, which had “an atmosphere of neutral austerity” – one visitor described her flat as “a machine for living in”. She offered tea to visitors, and biscuits: “shortbread, perfectly arranged, two vertical and then, on top, two horizontal”.

The minutiae of this detail is evidence of the issue that bubbles up regularly in the biography: that Lee is having to fill space. In the absence of big life events – all Brookner’s nonroutine travel is dispatched in one paragraph – what else is there?

This need to make bricks without straw is most obvious when Lee turns to the novels themselves. She passes 10 pages analysing the plot, characters and themes of Brookner’s debut, A Start in Life (1981); 11 on Hotel du Lac; 10 on Family and Friends; nine on Latecomers. Not all the novels are given such in-depth treatment, and Lee’s reading will provide a permanently valuable resource for future Brooknerites; but it does give the sense that the biography is so much about the books because there’s little to say about the life.

Brookner repeatedly spoke in interviews of her regret at not having children. “If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn’t be writing,” she said to one interviewer. “That’s why I write … because I have no children,” to another. Lee suggests that reasons may have included “that she couldn’t bear the thought of sharing her well-organised, self-sufficient existence with anyone else”.

In the absence of lovers or children, the book comes most alive in Lee’s account of Brookner’s friendships. We get lively accounts of her friendships with MacLehose, Callil and Barnes (whose friendship with her was “a kind of love story”) as well as rare openings of her heart. When she wrote a tribute to Ben Nicolson, who had been her beloved editor at The Burlington art magazine, she crossed out her closing line – “I miss him still” – in favour of a line ostensibly less effusive but for Brookner more meaningful, “He was a true friend”.

Her wit, so often overlooked in appreciations of her novels, was there in the person too. “What do you think of my new hair colour, Anita?” asked one of her neighbours. “Don’t worry,” she replied. “I’m sure we’ll get used to it.” But she could be challenging too. When historian Roy Foster was seated next to Brookner at a dinner, he told her how much he admired her novels. “I should prefer not to talk about this, please,” came her reply. “I do not like people to talk about my fiction. It has brought me more unhappiness than you can know.”

Yet the books brought much happiness to other people, even if they have been underappreciated in recent years. This book might, with luck, begin to reverse the trend. When Brookner died she left an estate worth £2.4 million. At her request there was no funeral; just two people attended her cremation. She was as evasive in death as she was in life. “How she would have hated having a biography!” Lee writes. But if she must have one, it’s hard to imagine one more loving, careful or worthwhile than this.