Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Brookner, Anita (Vol. 134) - Carolyn Cooke （review date 9 September 1991）

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Carolyn Cooke （review date 9 September 1991）

SOURCE: “Chasing Austen,” in Nation, September 9, 1991, pp. 274-76.

[In the following review, Cooke favorably assesses the novel Brief Lives.]

The British novelist Anita Brookner writes orderly, limpid prose about women who have been good girls all their lives, who have lived carefully and within the rules, but who, when they reach a critical mass of experience and disappointment, harden. The question is whether they acquire a granite toughness and become venerable, or, like sandstones too long exposed to weather, they grow brittle and crumble. This tension between venerableness and brittleness informs some of Brookner's best work—The Misalliance, A Friend From England and the Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac—and it is the central theme of her newest novel, Brief Lives.

Like Edith Hope, the writer of romance novels in Hotel du Lac, or Blanche...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. William McPherson （review date 10 February 1985）
   2. Robert Jones （review date 20 September 1985）
   3. Patricia Waugh （essay date 1989）
   4. Jonathan Yardley （review 12 March 1989）
   5. John Updike （review date 1 May 1989）
   6. Rosemary Dinnage （review date 1 June 1989）
   7. Phillip Lopate （review date 11 March 1990）
   8. Joyce Reiser Kornblatt （review date 21 July 1991）
   9. Carolyn Cooke （review date 9 September 1991）
   10. Jane Smiley （review date 22 March 1992）
   11. Constance Casey （review date 12 April 1992）
   12. Ursula Hegi （review date 10 January 1993）
   13. Gisèle Marie Baxter （essay date Summer 1993）
   14. Frank Kermode （review date 19 June 1993）
   15. David Galef （essay date Winter 1994）
   16. Jonathan Yardley （review date 9 January 1994）
   17. Carol Kino （review date 20 February 1994）
   18. John Bayley （review date 18 June 1994）
   19. Linda Simon （review date 8 January 1995）
   20. Frederick Busch （review date 22 January 1995）
   21. Hermione Lee （review date 30 January 1995）
   22. Ann Fisher-Wirth （essay date Spring 1995）
   23. Teresa Waugh （review date 17 June 1995）
   24. Hilary Mantel （review date 14 January 1996）
   25. Anne Roiphe （review date 16-30 December 1996）
   26. Deborah Mason （review date 26 January 1997）
   27. Heller McAlpin （review date 9 February 1997）
   28. Max Egremont （review date 7 June 1997）
   29. Jacqueline Carey （review date 18 January 1998）
   30. Aránzazu Usandizaga （essay date Summer 1998）
   31. Claire Messud （review date 31 January 1999）
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright