Christine Brooke-Rose
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Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose (16 January 1923 – 21 March 2012) was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. She is the author of A Rhetoric of the Unreal.
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. 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.
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.
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
