Penelope fitzgerald biography
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Like her prose, Penelope Fitzgerald’s life has front rooms and back rooms: public places where appearances are maintained and a comic, insouciant hospitality holds sway; and obscurer realms, where the cutlery is rusting and milk has been spilled, heads are bowed in shame, and everything is breaking apart. Fitzgerald’s public, literary life looks much like patience on a monument: having brought up three children almost single-handedly, against difficult odds, the author finds her voice late in life, and starts publishing when she is nearly sixty. Although she mock-modestly referred to her first book, a biography of the artist Edward Burne-Jones she published in , as nothing more than “My Little Bit of Writing,” we know better, because we know that she will go on to publish nine novels in the last twenty years of her life, that one of them, “Offshore” (), will win the Booker Prize, and that her final novel, “The Blue Flower” (), is indisputably great. We know that after her death, in , she will often be described as one of Britain’s finest postwar writers.
She learned how to wait: success as a late distillation of talent. The private story is much stranger and sadder and more haphazard, as Hermione Lee’s remarkable biography “Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life” (Knopf) reveals. The st
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Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography
Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography
New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year
Penelope Fitzgerald (–) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore in , and her last work, The Blue Flower, was acclaimed as a work of genius. The early novels drew on her own experiences – a boat on the Thames in the s; the BBC in war time; a failing bookshop in Suffolk; an eccentric stage-school. The later ones opened out to encompass historical worlds which, magically, she seemed to possess entirely: Russia before the Revolution; post-war Italy; Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis.
Fitzgerald’s life is as various and as cryptic as her fiction. It spans most of the twentieth century, and moves from a Bishop’s Palace to a sinking barge, from a demanding intellectual family to hardship and poverty, from a life of teaching and obscurity to a blaze of renown. She was first published at sixty and became famous at eighty. This is a story of lateness, patience and persistence: a private form of heroism.
Loved and admire
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