In 1967, Brookner became the first female Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge University. After this she spent three years studying in Paris on a French government scholarship before teaching art history at Reading University from 1959 to 1964 and at the Courtauld Institute from 1964 to 1988, where she specialized in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. from Courtauld Institute of Art, London, in 1953. Not only was her parents' marriage a stormy one, but she grew up in the shadow of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, since the family home was often filled with Jewish refugees from Europe.īrookner attended King's College, London, from which she graduated with a bachelor of arts in history in 1949. Her adolescence was not a happy one, however. Her father encouraged her to read, and she was reading the novels of Charles Dickens from the age of seven.īrookner was raised in the London suburb of Herne Hill and attended James Allen's School for Girls in Dulwich. Her father, who was born in Poland and was Jewish, was a company director, and her mother, also Jewish, was a former professional singer. Novelist and art historian Anita Brookner was born on July 16, 1928, in London, the only child of Newson and Maude Brookner. Neville that forces her to think deeply about what she really wants in life and whether she is prepared to compromise her ideals. In the end, Edith receives a proposition from Mr. The self-effacing, quiet Edith, a romantic soul whose relationships with men are less than satisfactory, spends much time thinking about how a woman ought to behave in order to satisfy her longings for love, as well as recalling in painful detail the reasons for her banishment. Edith intends to use her temporary stay to finish her latest romance novel, but instead she spends much of her time observing and interacting with the other hotel guests, who include a rich and glamorous but self-centered elderly widow and her daughter an upper-class young woman who suffers from an eating disorder a lonely, old and deaf countess and an enigmatic man named Mr. She has been dispatched by her friends in London to a hotel in Switzerland because of an unfortunate lapse on her part, although the reader is not initially informed about what the lapse was. It also owes something to the genre of popular romance novels its heroine, Edith Hope, is a successful writer of such novels.

As a result of her first three novels, Brookner had won a reputation for writing about the difficulties faced by middle-aged, single, lonely women, and Hotel du Lac follows this pattern. Brookner's fourth novel, it won the Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award. Hotel du Lac, by British novelist Anita Brookner, was published in 1984.

Author of hotel du lac