Brookner was a reviewer and an essayist long before she picked up her pen to write fiction. As an established academic, she was a go-to for editors in search of a piece on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, French painting in particular.
From the 1980s onwards, by then a novelist, Brookner's focus was more on fiction and literary biography. She appeared in the Observer, the Telegraph, the LRB, the TLS, prolifically in the Spectator. In the latter, for example, she wrote a yearly column called 'Prize-winning Novels from France'. She was often to be found contributing to 'Books of the Year' and 'Summer Books'. Her tastes were both predictable and surprising. She revered James, Wharton, Proust, Stendhal. She also valued the middlebrow women's authors of her youth, Margaret Kennedy, Barbara Pym. She was a significant fan of Updike and Roth.
There are many essays I've never read or found. No one, as far as I know, has made a list of her output in this form. There is something to be said for everything she wrote, and a Collected or even Complete Essays would be a thing to behold.
In 1997, in Soundings, Brookner as it were 'assayed' the concept of a Selected Essays. It is a curious, not to say rebarbative volume. We begin with three pieces on French art, versions of lectures she delivered at the Courtauld, 'in the beautiful Adam room that was then part of the Institute's home at 20 Portman Square'. The remainder of the book comprises reviews of books on French painters and writers. By way of ballast, we read of clowns ('Clowns do not make one laugh') and of Doris Lessing. There's also an account of a murder in America. Brookner's tone is arch: 'that shambling courtroom, in which everyone appears to have been eating junk food'.
The time is ripe for a fresh essay selection. (About a decade ago, I unsuccessfully proposed such a volume to several publishers.)
For starters, I'd suggest the following. (There are links to relevant Brooknerian posts beside each one.)
- Brookner on Proust and Freud, 2000 (here).
- Brookner's migraines, 1993 (here).
- Brookner, manipulated by Anthony Blunt, and later earning a mention in Spycatcher, 1987 (here).
- Brookner on Paris, 2010 (here).
- 'Mme de Blazac and I', Brookner's account of her student days, a rare example in her oeuvre of direct, unimplicit autobiography, 1997 (here).*
- Any number of Introductions to Brookner intertexts down the years. Perhaps the 2002 piece she wrote for The Portrait of a Lady.
