"Christine Brooke-Rose's Invisible Author: Last Essays is a valedictory, a fascinating leave-taking by a novelist/critic/theorist who has produced fifteen novels and four books of criticism in over half a century of writing."

-Karen Lawrence, University of California, Irvine



A blend of memoir and narrative, Invisible Author consists of an interview with Christine Brooke-Rose and a series of lectures Brooke-Rose presented in which she discusses her own work. By publishing these lectures and the interview, the author argues, she breaks the taboo that authors should not write about their writings (although they are constantly invited to talk about them in lecture form). This book's main concern is the narrative sentence, expressing the author's "authority." Traditionally it was in the past tense and impersonal, like that of the historian. The author writes every sentence in this book. Thus the ostensibly invisible author becomes visible.

Brooke-Rose's book will appeal to scholars of narrative and readers of fiction alike. In Invisible Author Brooke-Rose reflects on her narrative experiments by combining specific formal analyses with trenchant reflections on the course of literary criticism over the past fifty years. The book illuminates the relations among authors, critics and texts.



Christine Brooke-Rose is a novelist, critic, and lecturer. She is perhaps best known for her novels Xorandor and Verbivore.