Penelope Fitzgerald | |
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| Born | Penelope Mary Knox (1916-12-17)17 December 1916 Lincoln, England |
| Died | 28 April 2000(2000-04-28) (aged 83) London, England |
| Occupation | Writer |
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| Notable works |
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| Notable awards |
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| Spouse | |
| Parents | E. V. Knox (father) Mary Shepard (step-mother) |
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Penelope Mary Fitzgerald (17 December 1916 – 28 April 2000) was aBooker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist andbiographer fromLincoln, England.[1] In 2008The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[2]The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel,The Blue Flower, among "the ten besthistorical novels".[3]A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."[4]
Penelope Fitzgerald was born Penelope Mary Knox on 17 December 1916 atLincoln Medieval Bishop's Palace, the daughter ofEdmund Knox, later editor ofPunch, and Christina,née Hicks, daughter ofEdward Hicks, Bishop of Lincoln, and one of the first female students atOxford. She was a niece of the theologian and crime writerRonald Knox, the cryptographerDillwyn Knox, the Bible scholarWilfred Knox, and the novelist and biographerWinifred Peck.[5] Fitzgerald later wrote: "When I was young I took my father and my three uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else wasn't like them. Later on, I found that this was a mistake, but I've never quite managed to adapt myself to it. I suppose they were unusual, but I still think that they were right, and insofar as the world disagrees with them, I disagree with the world."[6]
She was educated atWycombe Abbey, an independent girls' boarding school, andSomerville College,Oxford University, where she graduated in 1938 with a congratulatory First, being named a "Woman of the Year" inIsis, the student newspaper.[1] She worked for theBBC inthe Second World War. In 1942 she married Desmond Fitzgerald, whom she had met in 1940 at Oxford. He had been studying for the bar and enlisted as a soldier in theIrish Guards. Six months later, Desmond's regiment was sent toNorth Africa. He won theMilitary Cross in theWestern Desert Campaign inLibya, but returned to civilian life analcoholic.[1]
In the early 1950s the couple lived inHampstead, London, where she had grown up. They co-edited a magazine calledWorld Review, in whichJ. D. Salinger's "For Esmé with Love and Squalor" was first published in the UK, as were writings ofBernard Malamud,Norman Mailer, andAlberto Moravia. Fitzgerald also contributed, writing about literature, music and sculpture. Soon afterwards Desmond was disbarred from the legal profession for "forging signatures on cheques that he cashed at the pub." This led to a life of poverty for the Fitzgeralds. At times they were evenhomeless, living for four months in a homeless centre and for eleven years in public housing. To provide for her family in the 1960s, Fitzgerald taught at a drama school,Italia Conti Academy, and atQueen's Gate School, where her pupils included Camilla Shand (laterQueen Camilla). She also taught "at a poshcrammer", where her pupils includedAnna Wintour,Edward St Aubyn, andHelena Bonham Carter. Indeed, she continued to teach until she was 70 years old.[1] For a while she worked in a bookshop inSouthwold, Suffolk, and in another period lived inBattersea on ahouseboat that sank twice – the second time for good, destroying many of her books and family papers.
The couple had three children: a son,Valpy, and two daughters, Tina andMaria.[1] Penelope Fitzgerald died on 28 April 2000.
Fitzgerald's archive was acquired by theBritish Library in June 2017. It consists of 170 files of correspondence and papers relating to her literary works, and of correspondence and other items belonging to family members, including her father, E. V. Knox, and papers of Fitzgerald's Literary Estate.[7] Many of her literary papers, including research notes, manuscript drafts letters, and photographs are held in theHarry Ransom Center.
Fitzgerald launched her literary career in 1975 at the age of 58, with "scholarly, accessiblebiographies"[8] of thePre-Raphaelite artistEdward Burne-Jones and two years later ofThe Knox Brothers, her father and uncles, although she never mentions herself by name. Later in 1977 she published her first novel,The Golden Child, a comicmurder mystery with a museum setting inspired by theTutankhamun mania of the 1970s, written to amuse her terminally ill husband, who died in 1976.
Over the next five years she published four novels, each tied to her own experiences.The Bookshop (1978), which was shortlisted for theBooker Prize, concerns a struggling store in a fictionalEast Anglian town. Set in 1959, it includes as a pivotal event the shop's decision to stockLolita.[9] A 2017 film adaptation, also entitledThe Bookshop, starsEmily Mortimer as Florence Green. It was written and directed byIsabel Coixet. Fitzgerald won the 1979 Booker Prize withOffshore, a novel set among houseboat residents in Battersea in 1961.Human Voices (1980) fictionalises wartime life at the BBC, whileAt Freddie's (1982) depicts life at a drama school.
In 1999 Fitzgerald was awarded theGolden PEN Award byEnglish PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature".[10][11]
Fitzgerald said afterAt Freddie's that she "had finished writing about the things in my own life, which I wanted to write about."[12] Instead she wrote a biography of the poetCharlotte Mew and began a series of novels with a variety ofhistorical settings. The first wasInnocence (1986), a romance between the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat and a doctor from a southern Communist family set in 1950sFlorence, Italy. The Italian Marxist theoristAntonio Gramsci appears as a minor character.
The Beginning of Spring (1988) takes place inMoscow in 1913. It examines the world just before theRussian Revolution through the family and work troubles of a British businessman born and raised in Russia.The Gate of Angels (1990), about a youngCambridge physicist who falls in love with a nursing trainee after a bicycle accident, is set in 1912, when physics was about to enter its own revolutionary period.
Fitzgerald's final novel,The Blue Flower (1995), centres on the 18th-century German poet and philosopherNovalis and his love for what is portrayed as an ordinary child. Other historical figures such as the poetGoethe and the philosopherKarl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel, feature in the story. It won theNational Book Critics Circle Award 1997 and has been called her masterpiece.[13][14] In 1999 it was adapted and dramatised forBBC Radio by Peter Wolf.[15]
A collection of Fitzgerald'sshort stories,The Means of Escape, and a volume of her essays, reviews and commentaries,A House of Air, were published posthumously. In 2013 the first full biography of Fitzgerald,Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life byHermione Lee,[1] appeared, and was awarded theJames Tait Black Memorial Prize.
