He has admitted that the pessimistic divorcée Mme Wyatt in 1991’s Talking it Over was partly inspired by her. (“Having done Barnes, I move on to Brookner, Anita”). When they were both nominated for the Booker in 1984, Brookner thought Barnes should have won for Flaubert’s Parrot she won for Hotel du Lac.īarnes namechecks Brookner in his story “Knowing French”, in which an elderly ex-teacher finds their books in the library. Both were outsiders: she the daughter of Polish Jews, he raised in London’s unfashionable Metroland both were Francophiles who wrote acutely about art and both had a certain chilly reserve in their writing.
Before her death in 2016, Anita Brookner would go for lunch with Julian Barnes nearly every year.
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