Brookner, Anita

Brookner, Anita, 1928–, English writer and art critic. After establishing an academic career at London's Courtauld Institute of Art and becoming the first woman appointed (1968) Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge, she began writing fiction in 1980, producing approximately one book a year of elegantly restrained prose. Her quiet, often bleak novels usually concern lonely, meek, and genteel middle-aged women (and occasionally men), unlucky in love and yearning for it, but largely unable to establish or maintain relationships with those around them. Brookner's works include Look at Me (1983), Hotel du Lac (1984; Booker Prize), Latecomers (1988), Fraud (1992), Undue Influence (1999), and Leaving Home (2005). Her nonfiction work Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000) is an analysis of French Romanticism.