British Novelist Puts Her Stamp on Characters : Books: Anita Brookner has explored her themes--romantic love and the difficulties of human relations--with elegance and ironic wit.

Jane Austen’s headstrong heroines. Barbara Pym’s “excellent women.” Anita Brookner’s lonely intellectuals.

Because she draws them so precisely, because she knows them so intimately, British novelist Anita Brookner, in a decade of writing that has produced eight remarkable novels, has come to be identified with her idiosyncratic female characters.

They are difficult, honorable women. They are victims who suffer at the hands of charming if elusive men, who are defeated by frivolous if “plausible” women, who shrink before life itself and their own inability to negotiate its hook-lined crevices, to steal an image from Virginia Woolf.

In one swift aphorism, Brookner tells us all we need to know about her women:

* “Dr. Weiss, at 40, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.”

* “Blanche Vernon occupied her time most usefully in keeping feelings at bay.”

They are women who have been raised with the curse of good manners. And though having good manners is problematic--”it means suppressing what you really feel and think,” the novelist explains--Brookner suggests that her heroines are victimized by their own reticence.

“I think reticence, rather than good manners, is sort of essential, but it is apt to be misread,” Brookner said in an interview. “People who are reticent are thought to have very little happen to them. But in fact they just don’t talk about it.”

Brookner is reticent, even taciturn. Whatever the subject, Brookner often just doesn’t want to talk about it.

Her answers are usually short, sharp, direct.

She is asked about the melancholy that seems to enshroud much of her writing: “I don’t think it’s melancholy. I think it’s seriousness. I think there’s a difference. I think people are frightened of seriousness.”

If people are frightened of seriousness, what is it that attracts them to her books? “The thing they’re frightened of? Feelings.”

If the thorny question of romantic love and the difficulties of human relations have consumed many of her novels, Brookner has explored her themes with elegance and ironic wit. Her 1984 novel, “Hotel du Lac,” won Britain’s esteemed Booker Prize, and Britain’s Spectator said it would “be read with pleasure a hundred years from now.”

Her most recent novel, “Latecomers,” published in the United States last spring by Pantheon, has been hailed by critics as a “breakthrough.” Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post said that Brookner “works a spell on the reader.”

Brookner is 50, unmarried and lives in a flat in London. If the circumstances of her life suggest any similarities to those of her characters’, she quickly dismisses the notion in a concise paragraph.

“This is irrelevant. I mean, whoever reads the novels surely doesn’t know me, so how can they assume that we’re alike? It’s based on ignorance. This is lazy thinking,” Brookner said in her clipped accent, her voice deep, luxuriant. “These novels are not autobiographical. It’s impossible to explain this to people who think that fiction is some kind of disguised fact, and that the novelist is a kind of . . . memorialist. This isn’t the case. Novel-writing is immensely difficult. It’s a projection.”

Brookner came to novel writing fairly late in life. (“I decided to try,” she said of her first novel, “The Debut,” published in 1981. “It was no big decision. It was almost idle.”)

Novel-writing had been an avocation to which she devoted her summer vacations, at the rate of one slim volume a year. Her real job was lecturing on art history at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. She had written three art history books--on Antoine Watteau, Jean Baptiste Greuze and Jacques Louis David--and established a reputation as an authority on 18th- and 19th-Century painting.

But Brookner retired last year, not to devote more time to novel-writing, she said with a faint smile, but because “I was very old and it was time to go.”

Brookner, who has full lips, dark hair and dark eyes and taps her cigarettes on a writing table before lighting them, said that she will slow down her writing schedule. This spring she completed a novel that will be published in England next year.

“I don’t really know that there’s much point in talking about it,” she said. “It hasn’t really crystallized in my mind yet. It’s quite slight. I enjoyed it.”

There is a novel between the one she doesn’t want to talk about and “Latecomers.” It is called “Lewis Percy” and is “about the sentimental education of a young man,” Brookner said. Lewis Percy is a librarian who “marries the wrong woman, falls in love with an even wronger one and lives happily ever after.” It will be published in England this year, in America next spring.

That will make two novels in a row in which her protagonists are men. “Latecomers” concerns two lifelong friends, Fibich and Hartmann, who as boys have been sent to England--without their families--from wartime Germany.

She enjoyed writing “Latecomers” for a reason that may surprise loyal readers. “I find it more interesting to write about men,” she said. “I think they’re more of a challenge and I think they deserve a little attention. I think feminism has raised women to impossibly heroic status. And I think men must be given a little more credit for their hurt feelings than they have been.”

Her rich, utterly convincing portrayals of Fibich and Hartmann are likely to go a long way in dispelling any labeling of her as a “women’s writer” and in bolstering her reputation for drawing characters with the scrupulousness of a master draftsman.

“The novelist has to know her characters,” Brookner explains. “I mean, every character is oneself. This is why it’s such a profound business. You have to be all those people. It’s not that all those people are you.”

And that is as much of a clue one is likely to get from the novelist about who she is. She will not, by choice, reveal herself.

“I hate talking about it. Because I don’t think there’s anything there to talk about. I think that the books should be self-explanatory. . . . I don’t think the facts of my life are of any help at all. What I’ve done or thought is irrelevant to the writing. I know people are curious but I can’t satisfy that curiosity, except to say that it doesn’t matter.”

She is asked of her life in London, where she has lived in the same flat for 25 years. “It’s very dull, it’s monotonous, deliberately monotonous because if you write I think you need to have everything taken care of. You need to know what you’re going to eat, where you’re going to be. It’s very rigid and most people would find it unbearable. I find it very agreeable.”

Brookner’s father was a Polish Jew who immigrated to England. She has spoken in the past of feeling like a foreigner, an alien. Although Americans think of her as very British, the British see Brookner as Continental, Rosemary Dinnage wrote in the New York Review of Books.

Brookner considered this idea. “I feel marginal, anywhere. I feel I have to be an observer,” she said. “I mean, this is what I’m born to be.”