Christine Brooke-Rose (16 January 1923 – 21 March 2012) was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her experimental novels.

Life

Christine Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland to an English father, Alfred Northbrook Rose, and American-Swiss mother, Evelyn (née Brooke). They separated in 1929. She was brought up mainly in Brussels with her maternal grandparents, but also studied at St Stephen's College Broadstairs before attending Somerville College, Oxford (MA) and University College, London (PhD).

She completed her university degree, reading English at Somerville College, Oxford. She then worked for a time in London as a literary journalist and scholar. She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, whom she met at Bletchley Park; to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz; and (briefly) to her cousin, Claude Brooke.

While serving at Bletchley Park and married to Bax, she had an affair with an American army officer Telford Taylor, who was himself married. This led to the end of her marriage with Bax, although Taylor's marriage endured for some years thereafter. Taylor was in charge of the American liaison section at Bletchley, and was later Counsel for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials.

On separating from Pietrkiewicz in 1968, she moved to France, teaching at the University of Paris, Vincennes from 1968 to 1988. In 1975, while teaching linguistics and English literature at the University of Paris, she became professor of English and American literature and literary theory. In 1988, she retired and moved to the south of France, near Avignon.

Bibliography

Novels

  • The Languages of Love (1957)
  • The Sycamore Tree (1958)
  • The Dear Deceit (1960)
  • The Middlemen: A Satire (1961)
  • Out (1964)
  • Such (1966)
  • Between (1968)
  • Thru (1975)
  • Amalgamemnon (1984)
  • Xorandor (1986)
  • The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus: Out, Such, Between, Thru (first edition, 1986; second edition, 2006)
  • Verbivore (1990)
  • Textermination (1991)
  • Remake (1996) autobiographical novel
  • Next (1998)
  • Subscript (1999)
  • Life, End of (2006) autobiographical novel

Short story collection

  • Go When You See the Green Man Walking (1970)

Poetry

  • Gold: A Poem (1955)

Essays and criticism

  • A Grammar of Metaphor (1958) criticism
  • A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971) criticism
  • 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
  • Stories, Theories, and Things (1991) literary theory
  • Poems, Letters, Drawings (2000)
  • Invisible Author: Last Essays (2002)

Translations into English

  • Children of Chaos, by Juan Goytisolo (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1958).
  • Fertility and Survival: Population Problems from Malthus to Mao Tse Tung, by Alfred Sauvy (New York: Criterion, 1960; London: Chatto and Windus, 1961).
  • In the Labyrinth, by Alain Robbe-Grillet (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968).

Awards and honors

  • 1965: Society of Authors Traveling Prize, for Out
  • 1966: James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Such
  • 1969: Arts Council Translation Prize, for In the Labyrinth

Further reading

  • Sarah Birch (1994). Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction.
  • Judy Little (1996). The Experimental Self: Dialogic Subjectivity in Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose.
  • Ellen J. Friedman and Richard Martin (1995). Utterly Other Discourse: The Texts of Christine Brooke-Rose.
  • Nicoletta Pireddu (2006). "Scribes of a Transnational Europe: Travel, Translation, Borders", The Translator 12(2), pp. 345–69.
  • G.N. Forester and M.J. Nicholls (2014). Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume 1: Christine Brooke-Rose.
  • Joseph Darlington (2021). Christine Brooke-Rose and Post-War Literature.

References

  • Christine Brooke-Rose Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin