I read Anita Brookner with chagrin and fascination. I have never before been addicted to a writer with whose values and vision I so consciously disagree. Every time a new Brookner novel is published, I buy it the day it arrives—in hard cover, no less. My life remains on hold until the new novel is finished. Yet when I close the book, more often than not I am angry. How can she offer that, I ask myself again and again, as an image of life, of womanhood?

One of the sources of my frustration is Brookner's well-known belief that nice girls finish last—that, as Edith Hope says in Hotel du Lac, life is a race in which the hare wins every time. There is some truth to this, as there is bitter truth to the line from the Bible that could stand as a text for Brookner's fiction: “Unto every one that hath shall be given … : but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath” （Matthew 25:29）. It's just that, in Brookner's vision, there is little acknowledgment that decency, kindness, or generosity could characterize the hare, could coexist with happiness and fulfillment. For all her gifts, for all her brilliant academic and literary success, Brookner writes with the pain of exile. The daughter of Polish Jews, raised in London, she refers to herself in her Paris Review interview as having always been unhappy, having always stood outside, and as “one of the loneliest women in London.” And, as she often has her personae say of themselves in their tormented attempts to negotiate a path among the vibrant and self-assured, sometimes she gets it wrong; she lacks the information. Having a rich, eventful life need not demand—as Brookner seems obsessively to argue—that one be ruthless, designing, manipulative, self-centered, irresponsible, or showy.

Yet paradoxically, Brookner's limitations are one source of her great strength: hers is not merely a neurotic, but in its cumulative effect a genuinely tragic, vision. All of Brookner's heroines are defined by lack. They exist, by their own choice, almost entirely within the patriarchal structures—particularly the conventional heterosexual rituals of courtship and marriage—that offer them only meager satisfaction. Their dream of simple happiness is that expressed by Edith Hope: “to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.” Relentlessly unliberated, they wear their hearts on their sleeves, longing for men who are never worth the intelligent, fierce passion they expend upon them. Unloved or at best tolerated, they devise rituals of camouflage and attempted compensation, trying to make up in painstaking dress, in the anxious preparation of meals for the beloved, in the careful application of the face, for lives they do not have. The cry of one of them, Frances Hinton in the early novel Look at Me, echoes for them all: “Look at me … Look at me.” But as Luce Irigaray points out, the “scopic economy,” the predominance of the visual over the tactile that characterizes Western culture, and that is at the base of Freud's castration theory and hence of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory altogether, condemns women sexually not only to passivity but also to nonentity. In the scopic economy, woman “is to be the beautiful object of contemplation. While her body finds itself thus eroticized … her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see.”

Though Brookner eloquently reveals that behind or within the “nothing to see” there is plenty to see, her novels about the hidden lives of women never really challenge this economy. Her women starve for a glance. The tragedy of her heroines, in fact, is partly the wholeheartedness with which they buy into the symbolic order that excludes them—excludes them not because they are unattractive, ungifted, or unlovable, but precisely because they want so much to be included. The allegiances are always to the phallocentric order, an order that always rejects and betrays them. Kitty Maule's story in Providence will serve as the type of them all: she chooses England, her father's land, over France, her mother's land; a lonely academic life over life with her mother's family; love for the narcissistic, unresponsive, and fervently Anglican professor Maurice Bishop over any other relationship. The novel ends with what she thinks will be her triumph: she gives a brilliant first faculty lecture, receives a university appointment, and is invited to a dinner party held in her honor by her lover Maurice Bishop. Sure that he will marry her, she travels to the party, thinking, “Soon I shall be where I have always wanted to be … in this house.” Once there, however, she discovers immediately that only she has not known that Maurice has another lover as well, the careless, sensual Jane Fairchild. “I lacked the information, thought Kitty, trying to control her trembling hands. Quite simply, I lacked the information.” Irigaray's comment on Freud helps us to a reading of the final moment of Providence, which is otherwise rather obscure. Irigaray writes: “The perfect achievement of the feminine destiny, according to Freud, lies in reproducing the male sex, at the expense of the woman's own. Indeed, in this view, woman never truly escapes from the Oedipus complex. She remains forever fixated on the desire for the father, remains subject to the father and to his love, for fear of losing his love, which is the only thing capable of giving her any value at all.” In a terrible moment of clarity, Kitty sees at last what house she has trapped herself in: the house of loss, of woman as emptiness loyal to and longing for the father. “My father was in the army,” says Kitty, fighting to hide her dismay as the guests all gather around her. But it is to no avail, because everything she has chosen has been useless. No matter how she courts it, the order of the Father will never be forthcoming: as she tells the guests, “He died before I was born.”

The characteristic maneuver of Brookner's heroines is to attempt to replace nothing with something, in imitation of the ones they feel to be lucky, hares instead of tortoises in the race of life （Hotel）. This maneuver, however, is characteristically foiled; hopes are destroyed, illusions shattered, and instead of access to the “hot garden” time brings only desolation. Especially in the earlier novels, the most humiliating nightmares prove to be true. Ruth Weiss in The Debut must finally align herself not with her childhood nursemaid's promise, “Cinderella shall go to the ball,” but with the fear of Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, “Je suis trop laide, il ne fera pas attention à moi.” Frances Hinton in Look at Me musters the courage to attempt to seduce James Anstey, but he leaps out of bed, telling her, “Not with you, Frances. Not with you.” And in A Friend from England, Rachel Kennedy must face the scorn with which Heather, whom she has guided and patronized, views her. Meek, childish Heather turns out to have the courage to find love, whereas Rachel, who has prided herself on her wise sophistication, must conclude that she has utterly failed because she has been “guilty of an error.” She finally learns, “It was not Heather who was endangered, but myself…. The fact of the matter was that the wonders of this earth suddenly meant nothing to me. Without a face opposite mine the world was empty; without another voice it was silent.”

A Friend from England is one of Brookner's most painful novels, constituting perhaps her most extreme undoing of narrative authority and humiliation of the narrator. It is also one of her most courageous novels, as in it she most thoroughly allows her protagonist to reveal and condemn herself in her own words. “I lacked the information,” Kitty Maule thinks to herself at the end of Providence in her moment of mortification. But the narrative voice keeps its distance, by and large, confining itself to the invulnerable third person. Nor, given Maurice Bishop's deceitfulness, is Kitty too much to blame for misinterpreting his intentions. She may be desolate at the end of Providence, but she is not shamed; no one but she knows of her mistake, and she is able to hide her chagrin at discovering Maurice's betrayal.

Like Kitty, Frances Hinton of Look at Me suffers a moment of exquisite sexual humiliation, when she discovers—also at a dinner party—that her lover James is passionately involved with Maria, and that she herself has been set up by her voyeuristic friends Nick and Alix Fraser to be betrayed. But again, like Kitty, she manages to conceal her anguish; she is hurt, but no one sees it. She even manages a counterattack, remarking to Alix that Frances's friend Olivia is only deformed in body, implying of course that the beautiful Alix is deformed in mind. But this is small comfort, given the blame Frances knows she must level against herself for forfeiting James's love. She has desired to keep their relationship pure, in a dimly realized wish to re-enact childhood; now, she realizes, she has made him “accessible to others but not to me…. It seemed to me that I, rather than he, had brought this about, and my despair was extreme. For now that I knew that I loved him, it was his whole life that I loved. And I would never know that life.”

Self-knowledge, in Brookner's fiction, has a great deal to do with acknowledging the depths to which one will sink, the lengths to which one will go, the ways in which one will abase oneself, in order to maintain the illusion of propriety, importance, or safety. For many of Brookner's heroines, self-knowledge is a mortifying business; even after Frances Hinton learns that she has been betrayed, for instance, she waits for a telephone call from her treacherous friends, knowing that, if they call her, she will go. Self-knowledge comes at last to the bitter realization that the self is founded—or not founded—on emotional chaos and, behind that, emotional deprivation. Brookner's women have been silent, dutiful children who cannot claim helpful relationships with their mothers—women who are dead, or selfish and egotistical, or overtly seductive, or themselves silent and subdued. They cannot resolve their oedipal longings because for one reason or another they also cannot claim relationship with their fathers, who are dead, or cowed and pathetic though kind, or childishly engrossed in their childish wives. Consequently, the heroines’ own sexuality is thwarted or tormented: Ruth Weiss and Kitty Maule have had practically no sexual experience, whereas Frances Hinton—in a pattern that becomes increasingly prominent in Brookner's fiction—has experienced a love affair of indescribable pain. Among the earlier novels, only Edith Hope of Hotel du Lac has experienced anything resembling happy or even temporarily fulfilling sexual love—and her affair with David has its drastic limitations.

I return to A Friend from England, the plot of which turns on a cruel reversal whereby the narrator, Rachel Kennedy, whose self-deception we do not realize the first time through the novel, is by the end utterly undone. She has prided herself on her savoir-faire and sophistication, her suitability as a guide for the young, specifically for Heather Livingstone, daughter of the couple who befriend her. When Heather divorces her transvestite husband, moves to Italy, and announces that she will marry her Italian lover, Rachel goes after her to bring her home, as the agent of Heather's parents. She offers what she thinks is a cunning compromise: play it safe, keep “your own home. Your parents. The shop. Your own life, Heather”—have it all, and Marco too. “People manage,” she tells Heather. Why go to such extremes? It may seem all right now, but in ten years’ time? Supposing you change your mind?” To her astonishment Heather turns on her, accusing her of living a life of “Deceit. Control. Arrangements,” and tells her that she has succeeded all too well in serving as Heather's guide—teaching her what not to be. She who has felt herself so important must learn that she is merely “a friend from England,” and must realize with terrible clarity that “I had failed, but that was not what counted. What counted was that I was guilty of an error. It was not Heather who was endangered, but myself. I felt shame, penury, and the shock of truth.”

The second time through the novel, having granted the truth of Heather's attack on Rachel, we read against everything Rachel says. Her tone, which seems unremarkable, friendly though a bit ladylike, the first time through, now comes to seem—or at any rate we suspect it may be—defensively superior and condescending toward the Livingstones, the coeurs simples in whose lives, we begin to suspect, Rachel may passionately hunger to be included, as a compensation for the absence of her own. At times Rachel seems monstrous, pathological, trying to insinuate herself as necessary, as Heather's noble, reluctant caretaker, into the Livingstone family. What makes her think Heather needs her, or that Oscar and Dorrie Livingstone will turn Heather over to her after they die, besides her own desire that this be true? What makes her think Oscar and Dorrie look to her as a model for their daughter? Do they? We do not know; there is only Rachel to tell us, and she exercises what we come to suspect is an unconsciously self-serving narrative tyranny.

This tyranny masks a desolation so pervasive that it subtly deranges Rachel's perceptions. Clues to the desolation become compelling; for instance, Rachel misremembers Oscar's casual greeting to Heather, “Well, dear. There you are. Seen your mother?” as, “in a look of real anguish, which I had never actually seen on his face … ‘Where's your mother?’ … And again, ‘Where's your mother?’” It is hard not to read this as Rachel's lament for her own orphanhood, “Where's my mother?” And in a later scene, the noblesse oblige Rachel sees in the Livingstone's acceptance of her hospitality may in fact be her own noblesse oblige in extending that hospitality, as a cover for her longing to be wanted, to be beloved and necessary like Heather, the daughter to whom she thinks herself superior. She thinks of Heather as “a potential victim. Not the victim of a violent action, exactly, but of a trick.” In fact, however, Rachel is the victim of a trick—of her own trick, her own pretense at poise, at living an integrated and fulfilling life.

For we gradually learn that Rachel has a secret life of pickups and one-night stands, of sexual wildness that she distances from herself and likes to think she can handle. Unlike what she thinks of Heather, she goes in for “clandestine excitement” and “secret alliances,” “unsuitable friends” and “dangerous acquaintances.” This is why she scorns Heather, who seems so simple and pure, and why she feels “we had nothing in common except Heather's parents.” This is also why she describes what she sees in Heather as “not incapacity, but absence.” But in fact Heather demonstrates, finally, a healthy ability to love; she is not furtive and clandestine simply because her sexual nature manifests itself in her outward behavior. Rachel “had no romantic views about marriage, or marriages“; her life “was perfectly balanced and satisfying”; but her furtive excitements only hide her failure to chance genuine emotion, only testify to her own incapacity and absence.

Frances Hinton of Look at Me learns to take her moral from an eighteenth-century engraving of ice skaters: “’Glissez, mortels; n'appuyez pas.’ Alluding to the thinness of the ice, of course.” A Friend from England marks the failure of this strategy of gliding for life. Rachel, who has “long ago decided to live my life on the surface, avoiding entanglements, confrontations, situations that cannot quickly be resolved, friendships that lead to passion,” falls right through the surface into terror. And the terror is a measure of her loss. As a child, Rachel tells us, she loved to swim and swam in the sea with her father every day. Now she is afraid of “the sight of water and some vague but powerful fear of being sucked into it”; swimming makes her think, and thinking “is accompanied by a wave of sadness.” She tries to replace the parents she has lost through her friendship with the Livingstones, falling into a “dreamy, vulnerable, childish state” in her weekly visits to them, embracing “their sleepwalking demeanour, the food that always appeared as if by magic, and the abundance of material goods that flowed through their lives.” Specifically, they seem to offer her the illusion of a recaptured pre-oedipal wholeness; the “deep peace and safety of their home” seems to promise safety to what Rachel suddenly admits she is—a “hapless swimmer.” But even here, in gesture and dream, her loss comes back to find her; she imagines Oscar at one point, for instance, “for some reason,” as a suppliant with roses, standing outside Heather's door. Perhaps the reason is her own dead father, her wish that he should long for her as she still longs for him. Or perhaps she sees in Oscar's imagined gesture a signal for the daughter's original severance from the mother with her entry into the symbolic order, when the father arrives in fantasy like a suitor at the door. Bereft in the past, unable or unwilling to acknowledge that bereavement in the present, Rachel finds herself engulfed by loss. On her visit to Heather in Venice, she must finally admit that she too is a city built on water, and that, like Stevie Smith's swimmer, her narrative—which has seemed so poised—has told of “not waving but drowning.”

There is, however, a countermovement to failure, most fully realized among the earlier novels at the end of Hotel du Lac, and hauntingly intensified in the superb final pages of Brookner's later novel, A Closed Eye. First, in Hotel du Lac, though the phallocentric order is never challenged, though woman never affirms her sufficiency and plenitude, Brookner does arrive at a kind of triumph. Her protagonist Edith Hope cannot transform her nothing into something, but she can affirm what Wallace Stevens calls “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Her choice to return to England at the novel's end, rather than to marry her cynical, cold suitor, Mr. Neville, is a choice to return to the pain of her lasting love for a married man who has probably abandoned her, ending their affair. But like Jane Eyre, another hunger artist, she refuses to define herself as not made for love. Alias Vanessa Wilde, secret write of romance, she finds her strength in her joined names, in the wild hopefulness of hopeless desire. As she tells her married lover David in a letter, “You thought, perhaps, like my publisher, and my agent, who are always trying to get me to bring my books up to date and make them sexier and more exciting, that I wrote my stories with that mixture of satire and cynical detachment that is thought to become the modern writer in this field. You are wrong. I believed every world I wrote. And I still do.”

I feel only relief when Edith finally refuses to negate her desire and enter a marriage of convenience with Mr. Neville, Brookner, however, has seemed to disagree. “She balks at the last minute,” Brookner remarks of Edith in her Paris Review interview. “As I wrote it I felt very sorry for her and at the same time very angry; she should have married … and at least gain some worldly success, some social respectability. I have a good mind to let her do it in some other novel and see how she will cope!” The appalling results of such coping are the subject of A Closed Eye. Harriet Lytton, the protagonist, makes a self-damning marriage such as Edith Hope refuses, not for her own comfort—for she is perfectly happy living with her parents and working in a bookstore—but for the sake of her mother, Merle, whose pleasure-loving habits are cramped by a child. Resolutely she embraces numbness, death-in-life, with her kind but boring, much older husband, to whom she is little more than “a restful presence and a compliant body,” but her calm domestic silences mask an inner tumult which cathects in longing for her best friend's husband, Jack. For decades she does not act upon these longings, and when she does, it is not only to act—that is, she presents herself to Jack, kisses him twice, but goes no further. What is fascinating about Harriet is the extent to which she chooses to live “a life not of her choosing.” She feels “dread” for her life, which is “an age without a name“; she lives with a “cowering feeling of dismay”; yet she refuses to speak, to change, so consciously, so intensely, that she reveals herself as starving for starvation. She can only live as hunger, in a state of what Rilke calls “unlived life, of which one can die.” Yet hers is no common reticence; she has no moral scruples that might keep her from adultery. Hunger feeds her, as life would not. The question, then, is why.

If I digress, I may suggest an answer. When Brookner published Latecomers in 1988, it seemed to indicate a radically new direction in her fiction. Widely hailed as a breakthrough, Latecomers departs from Brookner's earlier desolate, retiring heroines to focus on the friendship of Hartmann and Fibich, two aging European Jews who meet when they arrive as little boys in England, having been sent from Berlin by parents who then vanish in the Holocaust. Only Fibich's wife, Christine, an important but secondary character, continues in the line of Brookner's earlier protagonists. Mostly, the novel is an aching hymn of thanksgiving for the resiliency of the human spirit and for the friendship that has enabled Hartmann and Fibich to survive their childhood losses; the novel's refrain, “Look, we have come through,” comes from the title of a book of poems by D. H. Lawrence. When I read Latecomers several years ago, I thought that Brookner, too, had “come through,” that she had reached the true source of her sorrow and would begin more openly to explore her place in history as the child of Polish Jews brought up in exile in a tragic century. Certainly Latecomers has a range the other novels lack, in its moving exploration of the human results of political devastation. And yet, rereading it in the light of A Closed Eye, I see, not how different Latecomers is from the other novels, but how similar—and in fact, how quintessential—for Latecomers most dramatically expresses the originary moment, the constitutive loss, that informs all of Brookner's fiction and that, for instance, lies buried beneath the more obvious desolations of Hotel du Lac, A Friend from England, and A Closed Eye.

Near the end of the novel Fibich returns to Berlin, in a gallant and anguished attempt to recover the ground of his past. After almost a lifetime in exile he persuades himself that, if he is brave enough to return to the site of his destitution, his past “would be returned to him as an illumination, and that illumination would render him whole.” But he finds that there is nothing to find; the past has vanished, his loss will never abate. And yet, in a sense, he comes through; “although he was face to face with the terror and the alienation and the longing, he was nevertheless somehow still on his feet. He had not died of it.” Briefly he reaches a sense of affirmation: “Ah, he thought, the truth bursting on him suddenly, nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one's embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one's home.” And he even thinks of his son with joy: “His boy, his dearest boy.” Yet all of this is destroyed when, arriving back in England, he steps off the plane to see a woman faint. Plunged right back into the arms of his irredeemable grief, he re-enters the deathless moment when, as a boy being taken to England, he stares from the train window and watches his mother collapse from the loss of her child.

This agonizing tableau expresses the deepest impulse in all Brookner's fiction: the loss, or betrayal, or absence of the mother, which issues in an unappeasable hunger in the child. Situations change from book to book: Fibich's mother, for instance, abandons him through love, whereas Harriet's mother and Edith's mother abandon their daughters through selfishness. Blanche in The Misalliance loses her mother in childhood. Sometimes the loss is greatly delayed: Lewis in Lewis Percy, Mimi in Family and Friends, Fay in Brief Lives, and Anna in Fraud are adults when their mothers die. But whatever the specific narrative situation, it refers back fundamentally to loss itself, originating in what Julia Kristeva and others describe as the double severance between mother and child, the first taking place at birth, and the second with the child's entry into the symbolic order. Brookner writes of a lack every human shares, and a mourning without ceasing.

In her book on melancholia, Black Sun, Kristeva eloquently describes such mourning not just as an aberrant state but as “an exceptionality that reveals the true nature of Being.” Brookner would seem to agree. Some, in her fiction, ignore their lack: Hartmann, for instance, in Latecomers, turns from grief to pleasures, consciously closing the past behind him. But for all Brookner's avowed envy for the happy, the spoiled, the lucky, her fierce loyalty is to those who, like Kafka's hunger artist, “couldn't find the food [they] liked”—those who, in Kristeva's words, remain “absent from other people's meaning, alien, accidental with respect to naive happiness,” and who “owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to [their] depression.”

This, finally, is why Harriet won't have Jack in A Closed Eye: if she does, she will fall for the illusion that, at least for a moment, something in the symbolic order can sustain her. Instead, she keeps her loss where, with a frightening logic, it belongs: denied access to the mother, she projects the full weight of her love on to Imogen, her daughter. The names of the characters tell the desperate wish: though Merle, the “blackbird” mother, betrays her daughter as Madame Merle betrays Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady for the duplicitous safety of the phallocentric order, still, retrieval may be found through Imogen, the daughter, who, like Imogen in Cymbeline, appears to be fallen, appears to be dead, but will be magically resurrected. For, as Kristeva writes, giving birth, a woman “enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own mother; they are the same continuity differentiating itself.” Secretive, sexual, selfish, during her life Imogen defeats her mother's fantasies of a close, redemptive mother/daughter union. Imogen's death, however, releases Harriet at last to claim the power of motherhood as Kristeva describes it: “Closer to her instinctual memory, more open to psychosis, [she] consequently [becomes] more negatory of the social, symbolic bond.” She passes through “an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief” that causes her to “lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself” and finally surrenders all, even reality, to enter into visionary madness. These are the novel's last words:

Turning, she surveyed the empty room. My life, she thought, an empty room. But she felt no pain, felt in fact the cautious onset of some kind of release. Vividly, she caught sight of Immy's face. She drew in a deep breath, laughed. There it was again, Immy's face as it had always been. She laughed again, at the image of Immy's laughing face. Sinking on to the sofa she let the tears rain down. Never to lack for company again. All will be as before, she thought, as she wept in gratitude. When my little girl was young.

The epigraph to this novel only deepens the mystery. It is taken from Henry James and applies, of course, to Harriet: “She strikes me as a person who is begging off from full knowledge,—who has struck a truce with painful truth and is trying awhile the experiment of living with closed eyes.” Clearly throughout her life, Harriet has chosen to live with closed eyes. But when she recaptures Imogen, do her eyes close further?—does she create a mad fantasy, utterly disregarding both death and the sordid facts of Imogen's life? Or, as she moves beyond the phallocentric order into a wild zone we might call madness, or vision, or the consolations of the imagination, do her eyes open at last? When the doors of perception open, what do we see?

Coda. Brookner publishes novels faster than one can write essays about them. Whatever one writes of her oeuvre must therefore be open to question, for the figure in the carpet is incomplete. For instance, Fraud—the novel published after A Closed Eye—seems to arrive at a breakthrough when its heroine, Anna Durrant, disappears, shedding the yoke of dutiful daughter enforced by others’ expectations. “Don't be too obedient,” she tells her acquaintance Philippa when she encounters her in Paris at the novel's end:

Don't be like me. I believed my mother, who told me I'd be happy in due course, that the best things in life are worth waiting for. And I waited. That was the fraud, the confidence trick; that was the original fraud. All the others followed from there. I blame no-one, only myself. I shouldn't have been so credulous, nourishing my hopes in secret. I went along with it, I suppose. I thought it was the well-behaved thing to do. And one deception prepared me for all the others.

Perhaps Fraud offers a hope for genuine liberation. Philippa takes courage from Anna to drop her married lover unless he can commit himself wholeheartedly to her, and Anna discovers a way of supporting herself: “I'm going into business. I'm going to design clothes. Women of my age will always want decent clothes. Not everyone wants to be in the fashion, particularly if it looks absurd.”

Breaking free from both sexual hunger and what this novel presents as the destructive claustrophobia of the mother/daughter bond, both women discover their paths, “out in the bright, dark, dangerous and infinitely welcoming street.” The world lies wide before them—yet to my mind, the ending of Fraud seems futile unless one catches the echo not only of Adam and Eve, whose brave steps lead them forward into the world of loss and woe, but also of Isabel Archer, another motherless daughter whose “world lay before her—she could do whatever she chose” （The Portrait of a Lady） but whose own unacknowledged compulsions take her right back into the trap of Gilbert Osmond. Within Brookner's oeuvre itself, there is not progression in any one direction, but a powerful, restless circling around a set of obsessive concerns. So for instance, Edith Hope's rejection of a marriage of convenience leads to Harriet Lytton's acceptance of such a marriage; so too Harriet's abdication from the symbolic order into fantasies of mother/daughter fusion leads to Anna Durrant's impatience and claustrophobia, her final decision to reject the hothouse mother/daughter bond and make her risky way, clad in “decent clothes,” in a world of lost connections.

Since Fraud, Brookner has published Dolly and has announced that one more novel, her last, will appear. Whatever this final novel may bring, in Dolly she rings the changes on the subject of the daughters’ desolation, whether that desolation be caused by the absence of maternal love—as it is with Henrietta—or by the inadequacy of maternal love against death, hardship, and loss—as with Jane and Dolly. Once again, any particular loss seems secondary to loss itself. Jane, the narrator, wishes at one point that she could ask her selfish and dissatisfied aunt Dolly, “What do you lack?” The question reverberates far beyond the instance, for as Jane comments, “That was the most fundamental question of all.”

In the novel's final pages, Brookner addresses American feminists, through Jane, speaking to the kind of protest regarding her representation of women's lives with which I began these pages. Her characterization of Dolly—who, in the earlier novels, would have been a victorious “here”—reveals even this worldly woman's essential, unappeasable melancholia. No longer does the fiction pit losers against winners; hunger defines them all. Tenderness enters the narrative, and forgiveness. No matter how Dolly has used her, Jane comes to value her aunt precisely because of the intensity with which Dolly demands, “Love me! Save me!,” and to see in the “archaism and futility” of Dolly's desire an appalling but genuinely tragic innocence which assumes that anything could ever fill “an empty room, an empty evening, an empty life.”

Frances Hinton remarks, “I am famous for my control, which has seen me through many crises. By a supreme irony, my control is so great that these crises remain unknown to the rest of the world, and so I am thought to be unfeeling” （Look）. Edith Hope says, “The facts of life are too terrible to go into my kind of fiction” （Hotel）. But they do go into Brookner's. We as readers see beneath the nothing-to-be-seen that defines Brookner's women, so proper, so careful, in the view of other characters in her novels. We see beneath their posturing, too, the awkward retreats and exhibitions which they largely botch. We see to the empty, hungry center, the dwelling place of lack. Brookner's novels would seem to bear out Lacan's famous observation, “There is no woman who is not excluded by the nature of things, which is the nature of words.”

Brilliantly she writes of that exclusion. Lecturing on Benjamin Constant's Romantic novel Adolphe, Kitty Maule tells her students, “The potency of this particular story comes from the juxtaposition of extremely dry language and extremely heated, almost uncontrollable sentiments… . There is a feeling that it is almost kept under lock and key, that even if the despair is total, the control remains. This is very elegant, very important” （Providence）. What Brookner says of Adolphe describes her own work, too. Elegantly accoutered and impeccably made up, her novels, like her women, find their truth in limitation, their passion in despair.