[6] Anita Brookner had a lonely childhood, although her grandmother and uncle lived with the family, and her parents, secular Jews, opened their house to Jewish refugees fleeing the Germans during the 1930s and World War II.

[10] Under the supervision of Anthony Blunt, then director of the Courtauld, what was originally a Masters thesis on the French genre painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze was upgraded to a doctorate.

[5] However, she received a French government scholarship in 1950 to the École du Louvre and spent most of the decade living in Paris.

[5] She contributed articles to ArtReview in the late 1950s and early 1960s,[11] Among her students at the Courtauld was art historian Olivier Berggruen, whose graduate work she advised.

Her novels explore themes of emotional loss and difficulties associated with fitting into society, and intellectual, middle-class women, who suffer isolation and disappointments in love.

Brookner commented in one interview that she had received several proposals of marriage, but rejected all of them, concluding that men were "people with their own agenda, who think you might be fitted in if they lop off certain parts.