Brooke-Rose, Christine, 1923-2012

British experimental novelist, literary critic, translator, and poet.

From the description of Papers, 1893-1992 (bulk 1957-1992). (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC); University of Texas at Austin). WorldCat record id: 122632933

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland, on January 16, 1923. The younger of two daughters of Alfred Northbrook Rose, who was English, and Evelyn Brooke Rose, who was half Swiss and half American, Christine Brooke-Rose was raised in Brussels and educated at Somerville College, Oxford (B.A. 1949, M.A. 1953) and University College, London (Ph.D. 1954). Her parents' marriage dissolved while Brooke-Rose was quite young; her father died in 1934, and her mother later became a Benedictine nun (Mother Anselm).

During World War II, Brooke-Rose served as an intelligence officer in the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force, working at Bletchley Park. She married Rodney Ian Shirley Bax, whom she met through her war work, on May 16, 1944. They were divorced in January, 1948, and the marriage was later annulled. On February 13, 1948, Brooke-Rose married Polish poet and novelist Jerzy Pietrkiewicz (later Peterkiewicz). When her husband became ill in 1956, Brooke-Rose began to write novels after having published Gold (1955), a metaphysical religious poem based upon the anonymous fourteenth-century English poem Pearl . Her first two novels, The Languages of Love (1957) and The Sycamore Tree (1958), were satirical novels of manners. The Dear Deceit (1960), based upon her father's life, and The Middlemen: A Satire (1961) were also conventional novels, although The Dear Deceit used the technique of presenting the story in reverse chronological order.

After her own illness in 1962, Brooke-Rose's fiction changed dramatically; her next novel, Out (1964), discarded the traditional ideals of character and plot and began the play with language and form that has marked her work ever since. From 1956 to 1968, Brooke-Rose worked in London as a freelance literary journalist. In 1968, Brooke-Rose separated from her husband and moved to Paris, beginning a career as a teacher of Anglo-American literature and literary theory at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes. As a professor, Brooke-Rose was able to work on her fiction only during summer breaks. Such (1966) is the story of the after-death experience of an astronomer, told in terms of astrophysics. Between (1968), centering around the experiences of a professional translator, is a book about language and communication. In 1970, Go When You See the Green Man Walking, a collection of short stories, was published. Brooke-Rose has called her next novel, Thru (1975), a fiction about the fictionality of fiction.

Nine years elapsed between the publication of Thru and the publication of Amalgamemnon (1984); Brooke-Rose referred to this period as her traversée du desert. Amalgamemnon and three subsequent novels, Xorandor (1986), Verbivore (1990), and Textermination (1991), form a loose computer quartet reflecting on the demise of humanism. Amalgamemnon, written entirely in future and conditional tenses, is about a female professor of literature in a time when the humanities have become irrelevant. Xorandor is a science fiction story about the discovery by two children of a silicon-based civilization that feeds on nuclear radiation. The story is written in the form of dialogue and computer printouts by the children, who use an invented technological slang. The book incorporates areas of physics and was written with the assistance of the author's cousin, Claude Brooke, a physicist to whom Brooke-Rose was briefly married from 1981 to 1982. In Verbivore, a sequel, the now grown children must deal with Xorandor's descendents, whose activities have caused a failure of electronic communications media. Textermination, about the gathering of hundreds of recognizable literary characters at a Convention of Prayer for Being, deals with the advent of a semi-literate popular culture.

As a translator, Brooke-Rose is best known for In the Labyrinth (1968), an English translation of Alain Robbe-Grillet's Dans le labyrinth and winner of the 1969 Arts Council Translation Prize.

As a literary critic, Brooke-Rose is best known for her two studies of Ezra Pound, A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971) and A Structural Analysis of Pound's Usura Canto: Jakobson's Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse (1976). A Grammar of Metaphor (1958), a critical study of English poets, was an outgrowth of her doctoral work at University College. A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981) is a collection of essays analyzing narrative techniques in various types of fiction, while Stories, Theories, and Things (1991) contains essays of structural analyses of literary texts and general discussions of issues in literary theory.

Now retired from teaching, Christine Brooke-Rose lives in the south of France. The Brooke-Rose collection was purchased by the HRHRC in 1992. More information about Christine Brooke-Rose and her work may be found in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 14, pp. 124-129.

From the guide to the Christine Brooke-Rose Papers TXRC98-A40., 1893-1992, (bulk 1957-1992), (Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin)