Anita Brookner’s Booker Prize win was ‘disastrous and life changing’, says biographer

By the time she won the Booker for her fourth novel, she had already established herself as a distinguished scholar of French art and had become the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge.

But literary recognition brought an unwelcome change in her professional life, according to Lee, who said that some Courtauld colleagues viewed Brookner’s success with resentment, particularly as universities faced financial pressures.

In the biography, Lee writes that many witnesses said that “far from rejoicing in her success with the Booker, certain colleagues, especially the men, were jealous and resentful”.

Lee told the festival that: “Some of her colleagues came to see her and said you don’t need to be an art historian any more because you have won this prize. You are a novelist so why don’t you leave,” Lee said.

She acknowledged that the precise details of the encounter were difficult to verify, but said the evidence pointed to a confrontation in which Brookner was asked to consider reducing her salary, going part-time or taking early retirement.

Lee writes in the biography that it “seems she did go part-time; and within two years she announced her intention to retire”.

Lee said: “The word at the Courtauld was that she was badly treated and pushed out … she was, by many accounts, acutely wounded.”

The incident was particularly painful because Brookner had built a substantial academic career before achieving literary fame.

Lee also told how the Booker victory brought a hostile reception.

Many had expected the prize to go to JG Ballard for Empire of the Sun, and Lee described the media response to Brookner’s win as “by and large, flabbergasted, scornful and sexist”, The Times reported.

According to Lee, Brookner told her literary agent that Ballard approached her after the announcement and said: “You stole my Booker prize.”

The scrutiny intensified when journalists discovered that Brookner had changed her year of birth in Who’s Who, giving 1938 rather than 1928. The discrepancy became a source of public ridicule.

“That tone of ridicule, condescension, dislike went on right through her writing life,” Lee told the festival.

Brookner, whose novels frequently explored loneliness, disappointment and the constraints placed on women, subsequently appeared to embrace the image critics had constructed of her.

Lee argues in her biography that the novelist used the caricature as a form of self-defence, presenting herself as the isolated, unhappy figure the public expected to see.

Lee, an emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford and an acclaimed biographer of writers including Penelope Fitzgerald and Tom Stoppard, also challenged the familiar picture of Brookner as a lonely woman yearning for an absent lover.

If readers remember Brookner today, Lee said, they often imagine “a lonely, cardiganed woman yearning for an absent lover”. She rejected that portrayal, insisting that the public image obscures the complexity of the woman behind the fiction.

Brookner was born in south London to Polish-Jewish parents whose home provided refuge to people fleeing Nazi persecution during the Second World War. Her background and family experiences formed part of the wider story of a woman whose private life remained carefully guarded.

Lee’s work on the biography has also led to a final, personal farewell. Brookner, who died without wanting a funeral, had left her ashes with her second cousin, Ian Shine, for a decade.

Shine, who lives in the United States, eventually asked Lee to scatter them in Paris, a city Brookner loved.

Lee scattered the ashes beneath a willow tree and “said goodbye to Anita Brookner,” she told the festival.