Anita Brookner: Art and Life

Hermione Lee (author)

The groundbreaking biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers.

Anita Brookner was an intensely private person who kept her friends in separate compartments and had secrets she never revealed. She grew tired of the assumption that her lonely heroines were versions of herself, and resisted autobiographical readings of her books. But she gave away many intriguing glimpses of her own family life in interviews, and her own feelings, experiences and preoccupations fill her writings. Her life story, both hidden and exposed, makes compelling reading.

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.

'It would be hard to think of a better biographer for this uniquely contradictory intellectual…. piercingly intelligent… Lee’s biography … has joie de vivre, high humour and energetic compassion for the multiplying complexities of the human mind' The Observer

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.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Chatto & Windus
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Sept. 2026
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
• ISBN : ‎ 9781784744687