French was Christine's first language, but the family also spoke English and German.
Her father, whose surname was Rose, was English, while her Swiss-American mother's maiden name was Brooke. Frank Kermode considered that her originality and skills deserved "a greater measure of admiration and respect than we have so far chosen to accord them". Brooke-Rose wrote 16 novels, five collections of criticism and several collections of short stories and poems. Ellen G Friedman put Brooke-Rose among those 20th-century experimental female writers – Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein – whose novels "explode the fixed architecture of the master narrative". Many critics hailed her fiction, for all that it was sometimes scarcely comprehensible or pleasurable to those ignorant of the underpinning theory. When Brooke-Rose published a volume of criticism in 2002, it was not, perhaps, entirely devotion to Roland Barthes' death of the author thesis that led to her to call it Invisible Author. In her 1998 novel Next, which had 26 narrators, each of whose names began with a different letter of the alphabet, she omitted the verb "to have" to emphasise the deprivation of the homeless Londoners in the book.Īs if to continue the theme of erasure, Britain has all but airbrushed one of its most radical exponents of experimental fiction. She left out the word "I" from her autobiographical novels Remake (1996) and Life, End Of (2006), instead describing the narrator as "the old lady". In her 1968 novel Between, she left out the verb "to be" throughout, to stress the narrator's disoriented sense of personal identity – the year before George Perec's novel La Disparition omitted the letter "e". The marvellously playful and difficult novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, who has died aged 88, was fond of the device of omission.
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