SOURCE: Light, Alison. “Sense and Sensitivity.” New Statesman 6, no. 260 (9 July 1993): 33-4.

In the following review, Light contrasts A Spanish Lover with Anita Brookner's A Family Romance, criticizing both authors for reducing issues of societal conflict to the level of interpersonal conflict.

On the surface they couldn't be more different. [Anita] Brookner is melancholy, cosmopolitan, her heroines the denizens of heavily carpeted mansion flats and prosperous London suburbs, well-heeled and well-turned out but ultimately life's losers and its natural solitaries. Trollope, on the other hand, is cheerful and mildly Anglican, her territory the shires and cathedral towns, crowded married lives with boisterous families of growing children, with her middle-aged heroines going in for successful “late flowering”.

Different generations, too. Anita Brookner, the child of Polish parents, grew up in the 1930s and her novels (even when set, like A Family Romance, in the present) return inexorably to the long...