soundings

Dustjacket near fine, pages like new. Additional images available upon request.

A collection of essays and articles on art and literature, written over the course of the last twenty-five years by a writer who has earned recognition as much for her academic status as for the accomplishment of her literary career.

Brookner begins by focusing on the life and work of the great nineteenth-century French painters Gericault, Ingres and Delacroix. By examing their achievements and differences, stylistically, psychologically, and in terms of their philosophical approaches, she brings herself to an analysis of the complex clashes between the Romantic and the Classical movements themselves.

She casts her net wide, taking up subjects ranging form Rousseau's Social Contract to Doris Lessing's "Golden Notebook", from "The book of Job" to Corot. In this incisive, and sometimes controversial, collection, she also examines the loves and lives of women such as Rosa Bonheur and Louise Colet, who arrived at a certain greatness in the literary and art worlds but haven been less remembered than they deserved.