A restaurant meal with Anita Brookner went like this. She arrived on time, ordered the same thing – Dover sole with a glass of wine – and then, the moment the plates were cleared, she scarpered. The conversation was good – a mix of gossip about mutual acquaintances and, if you were up to it, French art and painting. The whole thing took an hour and a half, tops, but she preferred it shorter, because that gave her time for a cigarette before she set off back to the modest ex-council flat in Kensington where she had lived since the 1960s.

Dining with Brookner was a short, fastidious performance, qualities which also describe the novels she began to publish, at the rate of one a year, in late middle age. Her breakthrough was Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker Prize in 1984 and has sold millions around the world. After that came another twenty titles mostly concentrating on a handful of themes: displacement, loss of illusion, thankless family obligations and the sheer difficulty of being in the world. That is not to say, as careless critics did, that one Brookner novel was exactly like another, concerned exclusively with a disappointed spinster pining for an unavail­able man. Rather, suggests Hermione Lee in this flawless biography, it is best to think of Brookner, whose day job was teaching the history of painting at the Courtauld Institute, as an iterative artist. Like Monet and Rouen Cathedral or Degas and his ballet girls, Brookner returned repeatedly to her chosen subject so that each novel became ‘its own subtly different version of her lifelong examination of the human condition’.

Lee is quite clear that Brookner, who died in 2016 at the age of eighty-seven, would have hated a biography. The phrase ‘fiercely private’ is often applied to writers who, on closer inspection, secretly love the attention. But Brookner wasn’t one of them: she never had book launches, shuddered at the idea of meeting fans and took determined steps to frustrate any future commemorative efforts, declaring, ‘I have no private papers. I shall leave no trace.’ But biographers are obsessive, and Lee is too honest to pretend to have dithered when the idea of writing Brookner’s life was put to her by Bill Hamilton, the novelist’s agent and literary executor.

It is a meeting of minds. Lee’s distinguished scholarly career has often involved thinking and writing about women novelists of the 20th century. Her great skill is that of inhabiting a world at a time when ‘women’s writing’ was both a put-down and a stalking horse – a category in which ideas about political engagement, feminism and literary experiment could be tested, all the while disguised as a middlebrow novel of the kind your grandmother might borrow from the library.

Lee has done an excellent job of filling in the cobwebby gaps her evasive subject left behind. Brookner was born in 1928, the only child of anxious, unhappy parents. Her maternal grandfather had arrived from Poland in the 19th century and made the journey from East End tradesman to respectable suburban professional. Jewishness is not something Brookner explicitly bestows on her heroines, but many of them have an outsider status, with childhood memories of Berlin, Vienna or Baden-Baden (though they now live in St John’s Wood or Hampstead). Brookner herself was emphatically secular: when in old age she was invited by a distant cousin to Golders Green for Passover she fled halfway through. She wasn’t ill, ‘she’d just had enough.’

The place where Brookner felt most at home was France. Her doctorate was on Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the 18th-­century genre painter whose Hallmark sentimentality (liquid eyes, trembling lips and shouty moral message) might seem an unlikely choice for a scholar already making her mark as a crisp and rigorous thinker. The subject had been suggested by Anthony Blunt, director of the Courtauld Institute and Soviet double agent, who spotted a gap and suggested it to the promising young female scholar towards whom he was always ‘very nurturing’. It says much about Brookner’s signature intellectual clarity that her thesis was remarkably short. Turning it into a book, though, which most young scholars get done in a year or two, took her two decades. Brookner’s subsequent publications on artists with whom she was more naturally aligned, Jacques-Louis David and Eugène Delacroix, displayed the same deep thinking, rigorously distilled.

Lee is particularly good at describing Brookner’s time as a postgraduate researcher in Paris. Her clingy parents had begged her not to go, and the simple fact of being alone and elsewhere felt like a marvellous liberation. The postwar city might still be showing its wounds, but it offered wonderful cheap café lunches and extraordinary art. Brookner made the Bibliothèque Nationale a second home and was thrilled when an admirer left a bunch of roses on her desk. Happier still were the bus trips around provincial France to seek out forgotten Greuzes in dusty museums. Brookner already spoke the language fluently, and nothing pleased her more than being mistaken for a native. It was now that she adopted the ‘bon chic’ uniform that she would wear for the rest of her life: well-cut shirt and calf-length skirt, a low pump, discreet jewellery and elegant short hair. Stick thin, she was rumoured at the Courtauld to carry ‘Marmite and slimming biscuits’ in her good leather handbag. Decades later, when she was famous and easy to mock, Private Eye hatefully described her as looking like Rosa Klebb. This entirely missed the point that Lotte Lenya, the celebrated Austrian actress who played the Bond villainess, was, like Brookner, a bit of a stunner with huge eyes, a sensuous mouth and thick hair the colour of marmalade.

Brookner was given a teaching post at the Courtauld before being promoted to Reader. Known as a thrilling lecturer, she was also a surprisingly maternal presence and particularly kind towards any student facing relationship difficulties. Perceptive observers, however, thought that Brookner was perhaps over-invested in other people’s melodramas (she was a lifelong devotee of The Archers). Rumours inevitably abounded about her own romantic life. She was in love with Blunt; her heart had been broken by the dashing art historian Michael Jaffé; she had a secret life in Paris; she was a lesbian; she was the ‘Virgin Queen’. On this last point, Courtauldians might have been shocked to learn that Brookner once confided to a friend that the married philanthropist Max Rayne, with whom she conducted a discreet affair in the 1980s, ‘fucked like a navvy’.

By the 1970s Brookner’s academic writing, with its emphasis on individual personalities – she described Louis XVIII as ‘a dull fat man with bad feet’ – was starting to seem old-fashioned, and in 1982 an up-and-comer called Tom Crow eviscerated her book on David, describing it as ‘slight and lazy’ in its ‘refusal of politics’, by which he meant Marxism. Brookner was always devastated by bad reviews, so it is no surprise that it was at this point that she transferred her emotional and psychological observations (she was happy to call herself a ‘Freudian’) and subtle intelligence from art history to fiction. Beginning in 1981, she spent every university summer vacation pecking out a novel on the ancient Remington in her office at the Courtauld.

Her first, A Start in Life, opens with the well-known sentence ‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature’ and tells the story – perhaps closest to Brookner’s own – of a middle-aged academic who has dedicated her life to looking after her eccentric, self-absorbed parents. In Providence (1982), another lecturer, this time called Kitty Maule, frets away her chance for happiness on a detached and elusive colleague. In Look at Me (1983), another quiet single woman gets caught up in the emotional manipulations of a fascinating couple who ruthlessly exploit her. It is this set of concerns that reaches its apogee in Hotel du Lac, in which Edith Hope finds herself in European exile following a scandal in which she has ditched her fiancé at the registry office.

No one was more surprised than Brookner when Hotel du Lac won the Booker. She was up against J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot and David Lodge’s Small World. The expression on her face when the result was announced might best be described as appalled (you can still see the moment on YouTube). Ballard came up to Brookner later to snarl, ‘You stole my Booker Prize.’ The (mostly male) press muttered about how odd it was that a Mills & Boon love story had tricked its way to the top prize. The literary establishment spent the next twenty-five years reminding Anita Brookner that the whole thing had been a fluke. She never won another prize. Her publishers displayed less interest each year with the arrival of a new manuscript: ‘Oh God, another Anita.’ To add insult to injury, the Courtauld, which had resisted making Brookner a professor, now forced her to retire early from the job she loved on the (unofficial) grounds that she probably didn’t need the money.

Brookner was deeply hurt by it all, although, as Lee emphasises, she would never have seen it as a feminist issue. She held herself shudderingly aloof from the women’s movement, opining in a review of Germaine Greer’s book on neglected women artists, The Obstacle Race, ‘there is no more place for the feminist art historian than there is for the feminist radiographer.’ Instead, she did what she had always done, right from her younger days when her parents refused to let her study at Oxford or Cambridge because it would mean leaving home. She simply absorbed the trauma, gathered herself together and faced down the world with the kind of stoic resignation that she so admired in her beloved artists of the French revolutionary period.

It would be wrong to suggest, though, that Brookner was resistant to measured criticism. Lee emphasises that, following the annus mirabilis of 1984, Brookner’s work displayed ‘dramatic differences, astonishing shifts in feeling, and, over time, startling changes’. While the theme of longing never entirely goes away, there is more of what one might call ‘story’. There are also men. Novels including Latecomers (1988), Lewis Percy (1989) and A Private View (1994) all put male experience at their heart and are, Lee believes,
among ‘her best’.

Hermione Lee has written a wonderful biography, fond but not foolish. Her rigour means that she never simply equates the novelist’s heroines with their creator but offers instead a set of nuanced readings showing the ways in which art and life were engaged in a constant dialogue. Anita Brookner emerges from these pages as a considerably more subtle and varied author than she has generally been given credit for: spikier, sharper, cooler than anyone had noticed.