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  • Introduction:Anita Brookner in the World
  • Phyllis Lassner (bio), Ann V. Norton (bio), and Margaret D. Stetz (bio)

Anita Brookner has enjoyed several successful careers—as a British academic teaching art history at the Courtauld Institute and Cambridge University, as a scholar writing on French Romanticism, and, most notably, as a novelist. Since 1981, she has published twenty-five novels, with the latest of these appearing in 2009, and every one of them has found readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite the acclaim she has received (including Britain's coveted Booker Prize) and the diverse audiences she has attracted, she has often been described in print, by journalists and critics alike, as a writer whose concerns are narrow and whose talents are those of a miniaturist. Much of this characterization has borne with it a taint of gender bias, expressed through adjectives such as "limited" and even "spinsterish" that traditionally have plagued the careers of women novelists.

The year 2008 saw the arrival of her eightieth birthday, a milestone that seemed to call out for a new appraisal of her achievements and a new framework in which to evaluate them in order to bring attention to the unacknowledged breadth and ambition of her fiction. With that end in mind, the three of us—feminist academics specializing in women's literature and, moreover, unapologetic admirers of Brookner's novels—began the process by proposing a special session for the 2008 Modern Language Association convention held in San Francisco. This collaborative effort—the first MLA panel ever devoted to her work—took as its title "Anita Brookner in the World: Relocating the Writer at Eighty." Our intention was not merely to celebrate Brookner's long career but to recontextualize it. Through our papers, we would reconsider some of the standard ways in which she has been categorized—as a novelist of manners, a psychological realist, and a creator of tragi-comic romances. But most of all, we would re-examine the assumption that hers was a narrow set of interests, realized in a small and claustrophobic fictional sphere. Ultimately, we chose to reframe her work by looking at its engagement with the larger worlds of geography, politics, history, culture, and media. The figure who emerged from this conversation was not an English miniaturist but a transnational writer, crossing borders of gender and genre, as well as of place and location, and addressing expansively the most serious questions of morality, social justice, and art. [End Page 15]

Brookner's place in modern British and transnational literature revises many assumptions about modern and contemporary literary history. Just as her writing crosses and blurs national and cultural boundaries, so her formal, moral, and psychological concerns interact with new conceptions of realism, modernism, and postmodernism. As Ann V. Norton demonstrates in her essay, "Anita Brookner Reads Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Problem of Moral Imagination," Brookner's psychological realism is no less ambitious or incisive than that of the modernists, but her method of experimenting is different from theirs. Instead of privileging the subjective as the epistemologically correct perspective for our time, Brookner's narrative points of view often question attempts to represent interior streams of consciousness in order to investigate selfhood. Her novels certainly use first-person narrators, but they also employ limited onlooking narrators.

In both narrative perspectives, Brookner represents tensions between the possibility of knowing how desire, frustration, and anxiety are formed within consciousness and the external social and cultural forces that impinge on narrative and shape character. Brookner's narrators often hover around her characters, choosing not to intrude on their struggles for individuation. Instead, Brookner represents psychological life through graphic, painterly detail, depicting the still life—the objects and exteriors—that defines and expresses her characters' desires and responses. Yet her narrative point of view is never static. As Norton shows, it is a fluid, fluctuating instrument, just as Brookner's stylistic interests move among and against modernist and realist influences, as in the fiction of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

The essays we offer here demonstrate that Brookner's wide-ranging literary production cannot be confined to a single modern literary discourse, for her novels merge with...

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