Anita Brookner, a British art historian and author of lean, elegiac and stylistically polished novels who was once labeled the “mistress of gloom” for her depiction of bleak and disappointed lives, usually of women, died on Thursday, according to a death notice in The Times of London. She was 87.

The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Ms. Bruckner grew up surrounded by what she once called “transplanted and fragile people, an unhappy brood.” That sense of an unfulfilled world carried over into a career as novelist that started in her 50s and secured a Booker Prize for her fourth novel, “Hotel du Lac,” published in 1984.

For much of the remaining 20th century, she wrote a book a year. “It is the women who dominate her landscape, and they tend to be women of a type,” an article in The Atlantic said in 2001, “forlorn figures who seem always to be looking for Henry James’s bench of desolation on which to deposit their meekly skirted behinds for an afternoon of fruitless anticipation.”

Never married, she was often quoted as saying she wrote “because I have no children.” Her final work of fiction was a novella published as an e-book in 2011, “At the Hairdressers.” Her first, “A Start in Life,” published in 1981 when she was 53, was the story of Ruth Weiss, a young academic who seeks contentment in Paris before returning to London — a mirror of a chapter in Ms. Brookner’s own early life.

Ms. Brookner, the author Laura Thompson wrote in 2014, “is more honest about her own sex than any other novelist.”

“She would probably be torn to shreds by the new feminists were it not for the fact that her calm style helps to conceal her transgressions against orthodoxy.”

By the time she started writing fiction, Ms. Brookner had had a successful and high-profile career as an art historian focusing on French artists, notably Jean-Baptiste Greuze. At the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, her professors included Anthony Blunt, a renowned art historian later unmasked as a Soviet spy. She was the first female academic to hold the Slade chair of fine art at Cambridge University in the 1960s.

During her academic career, she published works on Jean-Antoine Watteau, Greuze and Jacques-Louis David. But among a wider audience, it was her fiction that drew attention.

“Curiously enough,” according to an obituary in The Guardian, “though Brookner’s art histories bubble with the delight of discovery and joyful exposition, her novels tend to describe a gray milieu of enervated, stranded and tentatively hopeless women.”

Writing in The Daily Telegraph in 2014, Ms. Thompson concluded that Ms. Brookner was “essentially an autobiographical writer.”

Alluding to her first novel, Ms. Brookner told The Paris Review in 1987 that she began to write “in a moment of sadness and desperation.”

“My life seemed to be drifting in predictable channels, and I wanted to know how I deserved such a fate. I thought if I could write about it I would be able to impose some structure on my experience. It gave me a feeling of being at least in control. It was an exercise in self-analysis, and I tried to make it as objective as possible — no self-pity and no self-justification. But what is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere — it is an art form in itself.”

“Hotel du Lac” features a female writer, Edith Hope, spending time at a Swiss hotel, wooed by a dashing suitor after an earlier romantic debacle. Discussing the book with The Paris Review, she offered a rare insight into the interplay between creator and creation.

Twice in the book, the fictional author “nearly marries; she balks at the last minute and decides to stay in a relationship with a married man,” Ms. Brookner said. “As I wrote it, I felt very sorry for her and at the same time very angry: She should have married one of them — they were interchangeable anyway — and at least gained some wordly success, some social respectability. I have a good mind to let her do it in some other novel and see how she will cope!”

Anita Brookner was born in southeast London on July 16, 1928, the only daughter of a Polish immigrant couple who had changed their name from Bruckner. Her mother was a singer, and her father was a businessman.

“I was brought up to look after my parents,” she told The Paris Review in 1987. “My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and I thought everybody lived like that. They were transplanted and fragile people, an unhappy brood, and I felt that I had to protect them. Indeed that is what they expected. As a result, I became an adult too soon and paradoxically never grew up.”

She added: “My father, who didn’t really understand the English, loved Dickens; he thought Dickens gave a true picture of England, where right always triumphed. I still read a Dickens novel every year and I am still looking for a Nicholas Nickleby!”

While she was born and raised in England, Ms. Brookner never felt comfortable there. “People say that I am always serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are never serious — they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious, which is sometimes maddening,” she said.

Ms. Brookner was educated a fee-paying school for girls in London and at King’s College London, studying French, history and art history. It was Mr. Blunt who “persuaded Brookner to move on to an M.A. in art history,” offering “genial and sympathetic tuition” that led to her doctorate on Greuze, The Guardian reported.

She taught at Reading University before becoming a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute. She retired as an academic in 1988 and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire — a British honor — in 1990. But she did not cast herself as a feminist role model in the most recent sense.

“A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature,” she told The Paris Review. “She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in. The ideal woman, on the other hand, is quite different: She lives according to a set of principles and is somehow very rare and always has been.”

She added: “As for the radical feminism of today, the rejection of the male, I find it absurd. It leads to sterility. They say it is a reasoned alternative, but an alternative to what? To continuity?”

While some critics called her work narrow and repetitive, “Brookner is the sort of artist described as minor by people who read her books only once,” the writer Hilary Mantel said in a review of “Strangers,” one of Ms. Brookner’s last novels, in 2009.

“The singular quality of each, as well as the integrity of the project, is established. Each book is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night.”