Penelope Fitzgerald

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Penelope Fitzgerald
BornPenelope Mary Knox
(1916-12-17)17 December 1916
Lincoln, England
Died28 April 2000(2000-04-28) (aged 83)
London, England
OccupationWriter
Period
  • 20th century
Notable works
Notable awards
Spouse
Desmond Fitzgerald
​
​
(m. 1941; died 1976)​
ParentsE. V. Knox (father)
Mary Shepard (step-mother)
Relatives

Penelope Mary Fitzgerald (17 December 1916 – 28 April 2000) was a

A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."[4]

Biography

Penelope Fitzgerald was born Penelope Mary Knox on 17 December 1916 at the Old Bishop's Palace, Lincoln, the daughter of

Dillwyn Knox, the Bible scholar Wilfred Knox, and the novelist and biographer Winifred 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 at

alcoholic.[1]

In the early 1950s the couple lived in

Italia Conti Academy, and at Queen's Gate School, where her pupils included Camilla Shand (later Queen Camilla). She also taught "at a posh crammer", where her pupils included Anna Wintour, Edward St Aubyn, and Helena Bonham Carter. Indeed, she continued to teach until she was 70 years old.[1] For a while she worked in a bookshop in Southwold, Suffolk, and in another period lived in Battersea on a houseboat
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 and Maria.[1] Penelope Fitzgerald died on 28 April 2000.

Legacy

Fitzgerald's archive was acquired by the British 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 the Harry Ransom Center.

Literary career

Fitzgerald launched her literary career in 1975 at the age of 58, with "scholarly, accessible

murder mystery with a museum setting inspired by the Tutankhamun
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 the Booker Prize, concerns a struggling store in a fictional East Anglian town. Set in 1959, it includes as a pivotal event the shop's decision to stock Lolita.[9] A 2017 film adaptation, also entitled The Bookshop, stars Emily Mortimer as Florence Green. It was written and directed by Isabel Coixet. Fitzgerald won the 1979 Booker Prize with Offshore, a novel set among houseboat residents in Battersea in 1961. Human Voices (1980) fictionalises wartime life at the BBC, while At Freddie's (1982) depicts life at a drama school.

In 1999 Fitzgerald was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature".[10][11]

Historical novels

Fitzgerald said after At Freddie's that she "had finished writing about the things in my own life, which I wanted to write about."

Innocence (1986), a romance between the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat and a doctor from a southern Communist family set in 1950s Florence, Italy. The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci
appears as a minor character.

Russian Revolution through the family and work troubles of a British businessman born and raised in Russia. The Gate of Angels (1990), about a young Cambridge
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,

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel, feature in the story. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award 1997 and has been called her masterpiece.[13][14] In 1999 it was adapted and dramatised for BBC Radio by Peter Wolf.[15]

A collection of Fitzgerald's

short 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 appeared, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee,[1] which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
.

Bibliography

Biographies

Novels

Short story collections

  • The Means of Escape (2000)
    • Paperback edition (2001) has 2 additional stories

Essays and reviews

  • A House of Air: Selected Writings (U.S. title The Afterlife) edited by Terence Dooley with Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff, with an introduction by Hermione Lee (2003)

Letters

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Hollinghurst, Alan (4 December 2014). "The Victory of Penelope Fitzgerald". The New York Review of Books. 61 (19). Archived from the original on 4 February 2016. Retrieved 1 January 2024.
  2. ^ "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Times (London). 5 January 2008. Retrieved 1 February 2010.
  3. ^ Skidelsky, William (13 May 2012). "The 10 best historical novels". The Observer. London. Retrieved 13 May 2012.
  4. ^ ‘Penelope Fitzgerald’, Telegraph, 3 May 2000, p. 27
  5. ^ Jenny Turner (19 December 2013). "In the Potato Patch: Review of Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee". London Review of Books. 35 (24). Retrieved 1 January 2024.
  6. ^ results, search (14 August 2000). The Knox Brothers. Counterpoint. ASIN 1582430950.
  7. ^ Penelope Fitzgerald Archive, archives and manuscripts catalogue, the British Library. Retrieved 7 May 2020.
  8. ^ Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (eds): The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (London: Batsford, 1990), pp. 377–378.
  9. ^ Mark Bostridge (23 August 2008). "So I Have Thought of You: The letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, ed Terence Dooley". The Independent (London).
  10. ^ "Golden Pen Award, official website". English PEN. Retrieved 3 December 2012.
  11. ISBN 9780203403907
    .
  12. ^ Harvey-Wood, Harriet (3 May 2000)."Penelope Fitzgerald". The Guardian (London).
  13. ^ Hofmann, Michael (13 April 1997). "Nonsense Is Only Another Language". The New York Times.
  14. ^ Harriet Harvey-Wood (3 May 2000)"Penelope Fitzgerald (obituary)". The Guardian (London).
  15. ^ "Blue Flower, The". www.radiolistings.co.uk. Retrieved 12 April 2018.

External links

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