Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life

Intimate, perceptive, critically acute, funny and moving, this is the first full biography of one of the finest English novelists of the last century.
Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) 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. The first group of these drew on her own experiences -- a boat on the Thames in the 1960s; the BBC in war time; a failing bookshop in a 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, as cryptic and as intriguing 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 started publishing at sixty and became famous at eighty. This is a story of lateness, patience and persistence: a private form of heroism.

Loved and admired, and increasingly recognised as one of the outstanding novelists of her time, she remains, also, mysterious and intriguing. She liked to mislead people with a good imitation of an absent-minded old lady; but under that scatty front were a steel-sharp brain and an imagination of wonderful reach. This brilliant biography -- by a biographer whom Fitzgerald herself admired -- pursues her life, her writing, and her secret self, with fascinated interest.