![]() We discovered more complexity than we expected from the slim 184 pages, and the more I learned about Anita Brookner, the more surprised I felt that I’d missed her for so long. I first picked up the novel because my writing group-all of us MFAers who’ve met for ten years post-program-wanted to read a book none of us knew. ![]() It isn’t just that Edith charts a different course, maritally speaking it’s that the novel’s dramatic focus is women looking critically at other women-something that occurs because Brookner has consciously placed her characters in a “gyneceum.” ![]() Plenty to consider subversive in a context that must append the word “still” to the assertion of a single woman’s worth.Īll the attention critics give to Brookner’s unmarried heroines, though, obscures what’s truly subversive in Hotel du Lac. ![]() Thanks to the jacket copy, a generation of readers has been primed to read Anita Brookner’s 1984 Booker Prize-winning novel Hotel du Lac as “potently subversive.” Subversive how? The headline of Anne Tyler’s contemporaneous New York Times review offers one answer: “A Solitary Life is Still Worth Living.” Edith Hope, the novel’s heroine, jilts a fiancé, rejects a new proposal, and ends her affair with her married lover. ![]()
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