Christine Brooke-Rose (1923-2012)

Novelist and scholar Christine Brooke-Rose, 89, died March 21, 2012 in Avignon, France.

Brooke-Rose is known for her experimental novels, which include some works of SF, including The Middlemen: A Satire (1961), Out (1964), Such (1966), the Computer Quartet — Amalgamemnon (1984), Xorandor (1986), Verbivore (1990), and Textermination (1991) — and Subscript (1999). She also wrote some SF/fantasy short fiction, including “On Terms” (1965) and “The Foot” (1967), and the title story of collection Go When You See the Green Man Walking (1969). Her scholarly book on fantasy, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (1981), is an important book in the field.

Brooke-Rose was born January 16, 1923 in Geneva, Switzerland. She served as a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer during WWII, working at Bletchley Park as an analyst examining intercepted German messages, an experience she wrote about in Remake (1996). She attended Somerville College at Oxford, where she took a BA in English (1949) and University College London, where she earned a PhD in Middle English (1954).

She moved to France in 1968, where she remained for the rest of her life. In addition to her work as a novelist, Brooke-Rose was a professor of English and American literature and literary theory at the university of Paris (Vincennes) from 1969 to her retirement in 1988.

A complete obituary will appear in the May issue of Locus.

For more, see her entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.