Fitzgerald, Penelope 1916–2000

views updated

Fitzgerald, Penelope 1916–2000

PERSONAL: Born December 17, 1916, in Lincoln, England; died of complications from a stroke, April 28, 2000, in Highgate, London, England; daughter of Edmund Valpy (editor of Punch), and Christina (Hicks) Knox; married Desmond Fitzgerald, August 15, 1953 (died, 1976); children: Edmund Valpy, Maria. Education: Somerville College, Oxford (first-class honors), 1939. Religion: Christian.

CAREER: Writer. Broadcasting House (British Broadcasting Corporation), London, England, recorded program assistant, 1939–53; also worked in a bookstore and as a teacher affiliated with Westminster Tutors, London.

AWARDS, HONORS: Booker Prize shortlist for fiction, 1978, for The Bookshop; Booker Prize for fiction, 1979, for Offshore; Heywood Hill Literary Prize for lifetime achievement in literature, 1996; National Book Critics Circle Prize, 1998, for Blue Flower.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Golden Child, Scribner (New York, NY), 1977.

The Bookshop, Duckworth (London, England), 1978, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1997.

Offshore, Collins (London, England), 1979, Holt (New York, NY), 1987.

Human Voices, Collins (London, England), 1980, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1999.

At Freddie's, Collins (London, England), 1982, Godine (Boston, MA), 1985.

Innocence, Holt (New York, NY), 1986, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1998.

The Beginning of Spring, Collins (London, England), 1988, Holt (New York, NY), 1989.

The Gate of Angels, Collins (London, England), 1990, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1992.

The Blue Flower, Flamingo (London, England), 1996, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1997.

BIOGRAPHIES

Edward Burne-Jones, M. Joseph (London, England), 1975, Sutton (Stroud, Gloucestershire, England), 1998.

The Knox Brothers, Macmillan (London, England), 1977, published as The Knox Brothers: Edmund (Evoe), 1881–1971, Dillwyn, 1883–1943, Wilfred, 1886–1950, Ronald, 1888–1957, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan (New York, NY), 1977.

Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, Collins (London, England), 1984, published as Charlotte Mew and Her Friends: With a Selection of Her Poems, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1988.

OTHER

Means of Escape (short stories), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2000.

The Afterlife, edited by Terrence Dooley, Christopher Carduff, and Mandy Kirkby, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2000.

Contributor to Modern Women's Short Stories, Penguin (New York, NY), 1998. A collection of Penelope Fitzgerald's papers are held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

ADAPTATIONS: The Gate of Angels has been adapted as an audiobook.

SIDELIGHTS: Penelope Fitzgerald published her first novel when she was fifty-nine years old. Some two decades and a Booker Prize later, she had established a reputation as an ironic, spare, and richly comic author. Even when the settings for her novels range as far afield as Florence, prerevolutionary Moscow, and Germany in the 1790s, she is praised for her sense of detail and her clear observations of human nature. In the Spectator, Anita Brookner characterized Fitzgerald as "one of the mildest and most English of writers," adding: "Mild, yes, but there is authority behind those neat, discursive and unresolved stories of hers…. She is so unostentatious a writer that she needs to be read several times. What is impressive is the calm confidence behind the apparent simplicity of utterance." Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Richard Eder noted that Fitzgerald's writing is "so precise and lilting that it can make you shiver … an elegy that nods at what passes without lamentation or indifference."

Some of Fitzgerald's early novels are loosely based upon her own work experiences. Born of a "writing family," she was educated at Oxford and was employed by the British Broadcasting Corporation during World War II. After her marriage in 1953, she worked as a clerk in a bookstore in rural East Suffolk; later she and her family lived on a barge on the Thames. These episodes in her life helped Fitzgerald to present, in her fiction, "a small, specialist world which she opens for the reader's inspection," to quote Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Catherine Wells Cole. In The Bookshop, for instance, a courageous entrepreneur named Florence Green defies the stuffy prejudices of her town, Hardborough, by stocking Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. The Bookshop was described by Valentine Cunningham in the Times Literary Supplement as "on any reckoning a marvelously piercing fiction…. There are the small circumstances that give rise naturally to a Hardy-like gothic, complete with a rapping poltergeist, and to a fiction where character inevitably comes to 'characters.' And Penelope Fitzgerald's resources of odd people are impressively rich."

Offshore, published in 1979 in England, presents a community of eccentric characters living in barges (much as the author did at one time) on Battersea Reach on the Thames River. As the tide ebbs and flows, so do the lives in the unconventional community, in both comic and tragic ways. Offshore won the Booker Prize in 1979 for Fitzgerald, who, at sixty-three, was still something of a novice writer. In Books and Bookmen, reviewer Mollie Hardwick described the work as "a delicate water-colour of a novel … a small, charming, Whistler etching." Similar praises greeted Human Voices, Fitzgerald's novelistic take on wartime work at Broadcasting House in London. There, one character wishes for a quick peace because he might be called upon to provide more typewriters than he has available; another one muses about the challenge of recording the sounds of tanks rolling across a beach. In Encounter, correspondent Penelope Lively found the novel "a clever fictional rendering of the way in which a random selection of people, flung together for impersonal reasons, will set up a pattern of relationships and reactions … told in a voice that is both idiosyncratic and memorable."

Beginning in 1986 with the publication of Innocence, Fitzgerald began to range farther afield for her stories. Set in Florence, Italy, during the postwar era, Innocence follows the fortunes of a patrician family in decline. In a Times Literary Supplement review of the work, Anne Duchene wrote of Fitzgerald: "Her writing, as ever, has a natural authority, is very funny, warm, and gently ironic, and full of tenderness towards human beings and their bravery in living." The Beginning of Spring presents an off-beat comedy of manners set in the household of a British expatriate in 1913 Moscow. As the thoughtful and upright Frank Reid faces the sudden departure of his wife—leaving him with three young children—he receives dubious assistance from some of his friends, both English and Russian. To quote New York Times Book Review correspondent Robert Plunket, with The Beginning of Spring Fitzgerald has become "that refreshing rarity, a writer who is very modern but not the least bit hip. Ms. Fitzgerald looks into the past, both human and literary, and finds all sorts of things that are surprisingly up to date. Yet as The Beginning of Spring reaches its triumphant conclusion, you realize that its greatest virtue is perhaps the most old-fashioned of all. It is a lovely novel."

Fitzgerald produced the well-received novels The Gate of Angels and The Blue Flower (for which she was the surprise recipient of the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Prize) in the 1990s. The Gate of Angels, published in the United States in 1992, concerns a fictitious Cambridge college for physicists in Edwardian England, and describes how the cloistered academy changes after one of its junior fellows, Fred Fairly, suffers a bicycle accident. "This funny, touching, wise novel manages, despite its brevity, to seem leisurely," remarked Nina King in the New York Times Book Review. "It is vibrant with wonderful minor characters, ablaze with ideas." Listener reviewer Kate Kellaway noted that, in The Gate of Angels, Fitzgerald "unostentatiously fills her story with quietly original observations so that you are constantly recognising and discovering through her eyes." John Bayley in the New York Review of Books observed that "Penelope Fitzgerald is not only an artist of a high order but one of immense originality, wholly her own woman. She composes with an innocent certainty which avoids any suggestion that she might have a feminist moral in mind, or a dig against science, or a Christian apologetic. The translucent little tale keeps quite clear of such matters, and yet it is certainly about goodness, and … successful at giving us the experience and conviction of it."

In The Blue Flower, according to Adam Begley of People: "Penelope Fitzgerald squeezes tragedy, history and philosophy into a short, beautifully written, desperately sad novel." Set in the eighteenth century, the novel is based on a true story: the spontaneous and overwhelming infatuation of twenty-two-year-old poet prodigy Friedrich von Hardenberg (later to become renowned under the pen name Novalis) with a young girl named Sophie whom he sees standing by a window. Novalis is a penniless aristocrat who nevertheless has attended the best universities. "Sophie," as described by Begley, "is an empty-headed twelve-year-old whose best feature is a guileless laugh." Fitzgerald chronicles their tragic three-year courtship, contrasting Novalis's aristocratic background with Sophie's thoroughly middle-class one. At the same time she brings to life the era in which they lived. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: "There's scads of research here, into daily life in Enlightenment-era Saxony, German reactions to the French Revolution and Napoleon, early-nineteenth-century German philosophy…. But history aside, this is a smart novel. Fitzgerald … witty and poignant … has created an alternately biting and touching exploration of the nature of Romanticism—capital 'R' and small."

The Means of Escape, published just after Fitzgerald's death in 2000, is a collection of eight short-short stories set in many places and times—Tasmania, England, France, Turkey and from the present back to the seventeenth century. In the Spectator, Philip Hennsher argued of Fitzgerald's writing in general and the title story in particular, "The interest in farce is constant; one of her best short stories, 'The Means of Escape,' is revealed, only at the very end, to be a farce, as well as, as the reader had always suspected, a crime story, a miniature psychological thriller." He added that she draws the farce into reality by describing her characters with minute realism. Additionally, World and I commentator Maude McDaniel noted that Fitzgerald "refuses to take sides herself" with her characters in The Means of Escape. "In these stories, she seems curiously detached from her own creatures, leaving readers to make of things what they will—a surrender of authority that has always annoyed me with other writers. Somehow it seems right with these offerings, which are less inclined to heavy preaching than individual nuancing," and, as McDaniel continued, often turning the reader's expectations on their head. "The reader cannot be sure of anything in ['The Red-Haired Girl']—except that in some way, lives have been touched and consequences changed." McDaniel quoted Fitzgerald in an interview: "I have remained true to my deepest convictions. I mean the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and lost opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy—for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?"

In addition to her many novels, Fitzgerald published several biographies, including one of Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Coley Burne-Jones, and one titled The Knox Brothers, which recounts the lives of her father and his brothers, each of whom contributed to British society in a special—and individual—way. Her 1984 biography Charlotte Mew and Her Friends examines the life and work of a British poet that Fitzgerald feels contemporary critics have for the most part overlooked. Once praised by novelist Thomas Hardy as "far and away the best living woman poet," Charlotte Mew (1869–1928) did not lead a happy life. Throughout her childhood her family's fortunes descended increasingly into poverty. She saw three of her brothers die before the age of five, and another brother and sister institutionalized for schizophrenia. Only her younger sister Anne, a painter of decorative screens, accompanied her into adulthood. In addition, Mew was a lesbian with the unfortunate habit of forming attachments to women who were not, attachments that invariably remained unfulfilled. Mew began writing short stories at an early age and soon became a regular contributor to Yellow Book, one of the popular periodicals of the day. Her fiction is consciously imitative of other writers of the era, such as Henry James, and has been dismissed by most critics as inferior work. In her poetry, however, Mew found her own voice, a distinct and original one of considerable power. April Bernard of the New Republic stated, "The poems are masterpieces of the lyric macabre, throat-catching, heart-stopping effulgences of rage and despair and love…. Mew's work is really only like itself, busting drunkenly out of whatever scheme it seems the poem has set, into long flailing lines and unsuspected rhymes." In her forties, Mew saw her work recognized and praised by writers who congregated around London's influential Poetry Bookshop. Her readings at the Poetry Bookshop were considered mesmerizing and the shop's owners published her first collection in 1916. The poverty Mew had experienced throughout her life was relieved when she received both a government artist's pension and a small inheritance from an uncle. However, after the death of her mother and sister, both of whom she'd lived with all her life, Mew's grief led to her confinement in a nursing home where she committed suicide. Phoebe-Lou Adams, reviewing Charlotte Mew and Her Friends for the Atlantic, felt that "Ms. Fitzgerald reconstructs her Mew's sad story with grace and intelligence, while the selection of poems the American edition appended to the biography makes it clear that Mew at her best was, if not a great poet, decidedly a good one." Bernard noted, "It is greatly to Penelope Fitzgerald's credit that she has not turned this biography into one of those ghoulish mystery stories reserved for suicides, wherein the entire life is cast retrospectively in the shadow of the subject's death."

In an essay for the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Fitzgerald wrote of herself: "Biographies and novels are the forms which I feel I can just about manage. They are the outcome of intense curiosity about other people and about oneself." That "intense curiosity" has produced a body of work that casts an eye on such intangibles as personal relationships, social institutions, history, and the interactions between them. "On a superficial reading Fitzgerald's novels may appear slight," concluded Catherine Wells Cole, "but their real strength lies in what they omit, in what has been pared away. Their skill and grace is not simply displayed technical achievement, but derives instead from Fitzgerald's absolute concern, often conveyed through humor and comedy, for the moral values of the tradition she follows so precisely."

Fitzgerald once told CA: "I've begun to write at rather a late stage in life because I love books and everything to do with them. I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they're about people the writer doesn't like very much."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 10, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989, pp. 101-109.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 19, 1981, pp. 172-175; Volume 51, 1989, pp. 123-127; Volume 61, 1989, pp. 114-124.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 14: British Novelists since 1960, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983, pp. 302-308.

PERIODICALS

America, November 11, 2000, p. 22.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 26, 1998, p. E2.

Atlantic, August, 1988, p. 80.

Austin American-Statesman, June 1, 1997, p. D6; November 12, 2000, p. L6.

Australian (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), September 13, 2000, p. B20.

Birmingham Post (Birmingham, England), October 10, 1998, p. 37.

Booklist, September 1, 1997, p. 57; October 1, 2000, p. 321; November 15, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of The Afterlife, p. 563.

Books and Bookmen, December 1979, pp. 16-17.

Christian Science Monitor, June 26, 1997, p. B1; May 6, 1999, p. 20.

Commonweal, June 19, 1998, p. 27; September 10, p. 32; June 16, 2000, p. 20; November 3, p. 32.

Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Australia), February 24, 1996, p. 007.

Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, 1982, p. 143.

Encounter, January 1981, pp. 53-59.

Essays in Arts and Sciences, October 1997, p. 1.

Explicator, summer, 2001, p. 204.

Financial Times, October 7, 2000, p. 4.

Guardian (London, England), March 27, 1998, p. 21; December 16, 2000, p. 10; December 21, 2002, p. 31.

Harper's, June 1999, p. 76.

Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), November 4, 2000, p. 20.

Independent (London, England), January 26, 2002.

Independent on Sunday (London, England), September 1, 1996, p. 37; October 1, 2000, p. 73; January 26, 2002, p. 11.

International Herald Tribune, March 26, 1998, p. 20.

Journal of the William Morris Society, autumn, 1998, p. 25.

Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of The Afterlife, p. 1218.

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, November 29, 2000, p. K5334; January 3, 2001, p. K3072.

Library Journal, September 1, 1997, p. 217; May 1, 1998, p. 144; May 1, 1999, p. 109; October 15, 2000, p. 107.

Listener, August 23, 1990, p. 24.

London Review of Books, October 13, 1988, pp. 20-21; October 5, 1995, p. 7; May 23, 2002, p. 17.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 23, 1989, p. 3; January 12, 1992, pp. 3, 7; April 13, 1997, p. 5; December 24, 1997, p. 11; October 15, 2000, p. 11.

New Criterion, March 1992, p. 33.

New Republic, August 22, 1988, p. 36; August 2, 1999, p. 39.

New Statesman, October 3, 1980, p. 24; November 6, 2000, p. 52.

New Statesman and Society, October 6, 1995, p. 38; January 28, 2002, p. 54.

New Yorker, February 7, 2000, p. 80.

New York Review of Books, April 9, 1992, p. 13; October 5, 1995, p. 7; July 17, 1997, p. 4; June 10, 1999, p. 28.

New York Times, September 8, 1985, p. 24; April 28, 1987, p. C17; March 26, 1998, p. B11; May 5, 1999, p. E9; August 31, 2000, p. E8.

New York Times Book Review, April 1, 1979, p. 21; June 29, 1980, p. 3; September 8, 1985, p. 24; May 10, 1987, p. 20; September 13, 1987, p. 51; August 7, 1988, p. 15; May 7, 1989, p. 15; March 1, 1992, pp. 7, 9; April 13, 1997, p. 9; September 7, 1997, p. 11; December 7, 1997, p. 12; May 9, 1999, p. 22; November 26, 2000, p. 8; September 16, 2001, p. 32.

New York Times Magazine, August 15, 1999, p. 30.

Observer (London, England), September 17, 1995, p. 15; September 8, 1996, p. 18; October 29, 2000, p. 11; December 24, 2000, p. 19.

People, April 14, 1997, p. 29.

Publishers Weekly, March 10, 1997, p. 51; July 21, 1997, p. 183; April 5, 1999, p. 219; May 17, 1999, p. 51; September 4, 2000, p. 28; September 25, 2000, p. 88.

St. Louis Dispatch, October 5, 1997, p. 05C.

San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 1997, p. 5; April 6, 1997, p. 11; August 24, 1997, p. 5; March 3, 1998, p. B3; March 25, 1998, p. E2; May 30, 1999, p. 11.

Scotsman (Edinburgh, Scotland), February 28, 1998, p. 3; November 4, 2000, p. 4.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 25, 1998, p. E5.

Seattle Times, April 20, 1997, p. M3; March 25, 1998, p. E6; September 6, 1998, p. M9; June 6, 1999, p. M11; September 26, 1999, p. M9.

Spectator, October 1, 1988, pp. 29-30; September 23, 1995, p. 38; April 11, 1998, p. 33; October 21, 2000, p. 44.

Star Ledger (Newark, NJ), July 12, 1997, p. 006; July 4, 1999, p. 004.

Sunday Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), October 15, 2000, p. 6.

Sunday Times (London, England), May 7, 2000, p. 18; October 15, 2000, p. 50.

Time, May 15, 2000, p. 35.

Time International, April 6, 1998, p. 13.

Times (London, England), April 13, 1998, p. 10, interview with Fitzgerald; August 8, 1998, p. 20; October 11, 2000, pp. 17; December 29, 2000, p. 27.

Times Literary Supplement, November 17, 1978, p. 1333; September 12, 1986, p. 995.

Wall Street Journal, April 8, 1997, p. A20; May 28, 1999, p. W6; September 26, 2000, p. A24.

Washington Post, October 1, 2000, p. X15.

Washington Post Book World, February 23, 1992, pp. 1, 8; June 1997, pp. 3, 13.

Women's Review of Books, October, 1997, p. 6.

World and I, January, 2001, p. 254.

World Literature Today, spring, 1998, p. 371.