Lonely, intelligent women were Anita Brookner’s stock in
trade. An early novel, Look at Me,
features a young woman who works in a London medical institute’s
research library and goes home to a too-large flat that she inherited,
along with the elderly maid, from her deceased mother. Frances Hinton’s
every day is much the same until a glamorous couple takes her on. Nick
Fraser, a doctor whose research the medical institute is funding, and
especially his wife, Alix, find Frances, so different from them, an
interesting diversion for a time. Frances is entranced by the couple
and believes they will be her escape.
What Frances has to learn is that people like the Frasers aren’t true
friends. They take what they want and then discard you when no longer
interested. Her life returns to drabness. The saving grace of the
experience is that Frances has collected material for a novel. She has
a talent for writing but would have preferred to be noticed for
herself: “I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to
come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to
state ‘I hurt’ or ‘I hate’ or ‘I want.’ Or, indeed, ‘Look at me.’”
Anita Brookner was an art historian who was 53 when she published her
first novel in 1981, and then kept up a pace of about a novel a year
until her death in 2016. Like her protagonists, she never married.
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