April 25 2026, 11:25

A Start in Life

Author: Anita Brookner

First published: 1981

I first heard about Anita Brookner as a literary personality through Andy Miller's love of her on the Backlisted podcast, even though I had read Hotel du Lac many years before. Until then, she was a name, but no more than that. His enthusiasm stuck in my brain, and over the last five years I’ve found myself buying her novels in second-hand bookshops. Whenever I dust and move my books around, I notice the growing Brookner list, and because my brain loves (the idea of) a project, I thought I should read her novels from first to last. I spotted a first edition hardback of A Start in Life on Amazon for less than fiver, and here we are. (That cover is glorious.)

Dr Ruth Weiss is a forty-year-old academic remembering her middle class childhood in a London flat with her eccentric parents. The family is looked after by Ruth’s grandmother, and when she dies, they employ a housekeeper, Mrs Cutler. Ruth's mother Helen, an actress, and father George, who owns a book business, create a ruinously decadent threesome with Mrs Cutler, who cleverly makes herself essential, supplying alcohol and a sympathetic ear to both while doing as little as possible for her money.

Ruth escapes the quietly poisonous threesome through her tenacious love of literature. She wins a place studying at a Paris university and begins to blossom, even as she harbours serious doubts about her own self worth and place in the world, especially in relationships with men. Her parents don’t give her much thought until their grimly bohemian setup begins to fall apart.

Brookner writes wonderfully about the psychological games people play, especially narcissists who can’t bear to think about other people beyond what they need from them. Her descriptions are cuttingly precise, and the deep melancholy of Ruth’s inner life is explored gently, obliquely, but is clear all the same.

This is her first novel, which was published when she was fifty-three years old, and she wrote over twenty more after it, but her talent is clear immediately. She describes A Start in Life as an investigation of her early years, and she was making up her style as she went along to help with that self-analysis, but it’s also not autobiographical, or at least not literally so. There are strong parallels to her own parents, but Ruth Weiss is not Anita Brookner, and because she was such a private person, we'll never know the overlap. It’s creative writing as a type of therapy, and I love it.

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