Unravelling Anita Brookner’s Leaving Home

Abstract

Anita Brookner (1928 - ) is a contemporary British novelist and French Romantic art historian known to write novels which explore moral, social, and gender issues similarly to her great influences Henry James and Edith Wharton. Her narratology exhaustively and less decisively analyzes humanity’s limited comprehension and consciousness. It reflects an uncertain postmodern world about lonely, single women. Born in London on 16 July 1928, she is educated at James Allen’s Girls’ School. She is born and brought up in a large Victorian villa in Herne Hill in South London. Brookner, one of the prominent novelists, unravels Leaving Home using a volcanic imagery. As lava erupts from a volcano, a name erupts from the past in a peaceful night, from the third person narrator, Emma Roberts who assures her position to be the protagonist of this work of art. Hence the eruption of her psyche could be expected in the novel. Literary master Brookner’s elegant style is manifest on every page of her brilliant novel beautifully crafted and emotionally evocative. Caryn James says that Brookner’s novels generally depict a solitary, intelligent and elegant heroine, ironic and privileged, who attempts to reconcile her experience of the world with her expectations. A small number of her novels feature male protagonists, although gender indicators do not substantially alter character or plot in Brookner’s fiction. The Brooknerine male or female often displays forms of ennui, a broad capacity for self-reflection and, as walking-protagonists; they inevitably guide readers through the streets of inner-city London. The novels are set primarily in contemporary Britain, although trips to the continent are often imagined if not actualised. At times, the Brooknerine’s knowledge of nineteenth-century art and literature informs a misreading of context, but also underwrites a complex narrative voice. Significantly, references to nineteenth-century textual and aesthetic production produce a nineteenth-century effect in Brookner’s fiction and denote an archive of inter - textual source material in the Brookner text.