Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald (born December 17, 1916, Lincoln, England—died April 28, 2000, London) was an English novelist and biographer noted for her economical, yet evocative, witty, and intricate works often concerned with the efforts of her characters to cope with their unfortunate life circumstances. Although she did not begin writing until she was in her late 50s, she published nine novels and three biographies and was honoured with some of literature’s top awards.

Fitzgerald’s father, Edmund Knox, was the editor of Punch; her uncle Ronald translated the Bible and wrote detective stories. She attended boarding school at Wycombe Abbey in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and took first-class honours at Somerville College, Oxford. After graduation (1939), she worked at the Ministry of Food and at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and in 1941 she married Desmond Fitzgerald. With him she edited the short-lived literary-political journal World Review in the early 1950s and raised three children while working at a variety of jobs, which included managing a bookstore, teaching English at a school for child actors, and tutoring.

She published two biographies—the first of Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones (1975, rev.ed. 1997), at age 58, and the second a group biography of her father and three uncles (The Knox Brothers, 1977)—before publishing her first work of fiction. Her first novel, The Golden Child (1977), is a detective story of murder in a museum. The Bookshop (1978), a story rife with betrayal, is praised for its mordant wit. In Offshore (1979), Fitzgerald’s characters live on houseboats (as she herself once did); this taut portrayal of a closed community won her the Booker Prize. Human Voices (1980), a humorous account of the BBC in 1940, successfully evokes wartime Britain, and At Freddie’s (1982) concerns a school for child actors. That same year she also edited an unfinished novel by William Morris, The Novel on Blue Paper.

In 1984 she published her third and final biography, about the life of a neglected British poet, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends. Fitzgerald returned to fiction with Innocence (1986), a love story set in Florence in the mid-1950s. The Beginning of Spring (1988), about an English-run printing business in 1913 Moscow, is filled with details about daily life in prerevolutionary Russia. That book and The Gate of Angels (1990), set in pre-World War I Cambridge, were short-listed for the Booker Prize.

Inspired by a visit she made to a church in Bonn, Germany, where she heard hymns with words by German Romantic poet Novalis, she wrote her last work, the masterful novel The Blue Flower (1995). Based on Novalis’s life, it is an exceptional re-creation of life in 18th-century Saxony and an imaginative view of the poet’s perceptions. It won her the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award, making her the first non-American to receive that honour. A collection of Fitzgerald’s stories, The Means of Escape (2000), was published posthumously, as was a collection of her letters, edited by Terence Dooley, So I Have Thought of You (2008).