[A Start in Life is] the sort of book which gives feminist writing a good name. A Start in Life sets the experience of a modern woman academic, working on Balzac, against the plot of Eugénie Grandet. The craftsmanship is, if anything, almost too sedulous. But it produces a very pungent fable about the sacrifice of daughters to the needs of their elderly parents.

Anita Brookner 1938– © Jerry Bauer

Nicholas Shrimpton, "Bond at 70," in New Statesman, Vol. 101, No. 2618, May 22, 1981, p. 21.∗