BROOKNER, Anita. A Start in Life. London: Jonathan Cape. 1981.
8vo. Original pale grey cloth lettered in gilt to spine, in the unclipped dustwrapper designed by Suzanne Perkins; pp. 176; a touch of rubbing to lower spine tip, original price to front flap overlaid with the publisher’s reprice sticker; a remarkably sharp, fine copy, in like wrapper.
A uncommonly bright first printing of Brookner’s debut novel, in a lovely example of the Suzanne Perkins wrapper.
By the time Anita Brookner published this, her first novel, at the age of 53, she was a respected art historian (an authority on eighteenth and nineteenth-century painting with published volumes on Greuze and Jacques-Louis David), teaching at the Courtauld Institute, and the first woman to be appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge.
Tessa Hadley has written that in A Start in Life Brookner “seems to spring into being as a novelist fully-formed”. Its protagonist Ruth Weiss (working on the second volume of her academic study, “Women in Balzac’s Novels” while taking care of her parents) is a template for future Brookner heroines and, as with the author’s later novels, this auspicious (and perfectly titled) debut is, as Hadley has it, “blackly, bleakly, wonderfully funny.” Three years later, she would win the Booker Prize for her fourth novel Hotel Du Lac (1984).
SKU: 2123879