Christine Brooke-Rose
Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose (16 January 1923 – 21 March 2012[1]) was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels.[2]
Biography
Christine Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland to an English father and American-Swiss mother. She was brought up mainly in Brussels, and educated there, at Somerville College, Oxford and University College, London.[2] During World War II she worked at Bletchley Park as a WAAF in intelligence, later completing her university degree. She then worked for a time in London as a literary journalist and scholar. On separating from Pietrkiewicz in 1968 she took a position at the University of Paris, Vincennes, from 1968 to 1988 and retired in the south of France where she spent the rest of her life.[2]
Her novel Remake (1996) is an autobiographical novel:
- It is an autobiographical novel with a difference, using life material to compose a third-person fiction, transformed in an experiment whose tensions are those of memory -- distorting and partial -- checked by a rigorous and sceptical language which probes and finds durable forms underlying the impulses and passions of the subject. It is not a simple process of chronological remembering. Remake captures not facts but the contents of those facts, the feelings of a war-time child, the textures of her clothing, tastes and smells, her mother, an absent father, a gradual transformation into adulthood.[2]
She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, whom she met at Bletchley Park; to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz; and briefly to Claude Brooke. She shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Such (1966).
She was also known as a translator from French, in particular of works by Robbe-Grillet.
Works
- Gold (1955) poem
- The Languages of Love (1957) novel
- The Sycamore Tree (1958) novel
- A Grammar of Metaphor (1958) criticism
- The Dear Deceit (1960) novel
- The Middlemen: A Satire (1961) novel
- Out (1964) novel
- Such (1966) novel
- Between (1968) novel
- Go When You See the Green Man Walking (1970) short stories
- A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971) criticism
- Thru (1975) novel
- A Structural Analysis of Pound's Usura Canto: Jakobson's Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse (1976) criticism
- A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (1981) criticism
- Amalgamemnon (1984) novel
- Xorandor (1986) novel
- Verbivore (1990) novel
- Stories, Theories, and Things (1991) literary theory
- Textermination (1991) novel
- Remake (1996) autobiographical novel
- Next (1998) novel
- Subscript (1999) novel
- Poems, Letters, Drawings (2000)
- Invisible Author: Last Essays (2002)
- Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (2002) with Ellen Weil
- Life, End of (2006) autobiographical novel
- Brooke-Rose Omnibus (2006)
Further reading
- Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction (1994) Sarah Birch
- Utterly other discourse : the texts of Christine Brooke-Rose (1995) Ellen J. Friedman and Richard Martin
- Nicoletta Pireddu, "Scribes of a transnational Europe: Travel, Translation, Borders," "The Translator" 12 (2), 2006: 345-69.
References
- ^ Margalit Fox (10 April 2012). "Christine Brooke-Rose, Inventive Writer, Dies at 89". The New York Times.
- ^ a b c d "Christine Brooke-Rose is dead", PN Review, 22 Mar 2012
External links
- Use dmy dates from April 2012
- 1923 births
- 2012 deaths
- British literary critics
- English emigrants to France
- French–English translators
- Alumni of Somerville College, Oxford
- Alumni of University College London
- University of Paris faculty
- Women's Auxiliary Air Force airwomen
- People associated with Bletchley Park
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients
- 20th-century translators
- 20th-century women writers
- 21st-century women writers
- 20th-century British poets
- 20th-century British novelists
- 21st-century British novelists
- 21st-century translators