14 Facts About Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner was an English novelist and art historian.

Anita Brookner was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge from 1967 to 1968 and was the first woman to hold this visiting professorship.

Anita Brookner was the only child of Newson Bruckner, a Jewish immigrant from Piotrkow Trybunalski in Poland, and Maude Schiska, a singer whose grandfather had emigrated from Warsaw, Poland, and founded a tobacco factory at which her husband worked after arriving in Britain aged 18.

Anita Brookner's mother gave up her singing career when she married and, according to her daughter, was unhappy for the rest of her life.

Maude changed the family's surname to Brookner because of anti-German sentiment in Britain following World War I Anita Brookner had a lonely childhood, although her grandmother and uncle lived with the family, and her parents, secular Jews, opened their house to Jewish refugees fleeing the Germans during the 1930s and World War II.

Anita Brookner was educated at the James Allen's Girls' School, a fee-paying school.

Anita Brookner was a visiting lecturer at Reading University from 1959 to 1964 when she became a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Anita Brookner was promoted to Reader at the Courtauld in 1977, where she worked until her retirement in 1988.

Anita Brookner began her career as a specialist on 18th century French art but later extended her expertise to the romantics.

Anita Brookner contributed articles to ArtReview in the late 1950s and early 1960s,.

Anita Brookner was a Fellow of King's College London and of New Hall, Cambridge.

Anita Brookner published her first novel, A Start in Life, at the age of 53.

Anita Brookner never married, but took care of her parents as they aged.

Anita Brookner died in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, on 10 March 2016, at the age of 87.