Late Novels

This chapter examines the four ‘late’ novels that are the peak of Penelope Fitzgerald’s achievement as a writer: Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower. Each novel is, at least superficially, a work of historical fiction in that it is set in the past: in 1950s Italy, in revolutionary Russia, in Edwardian England, and in late-eighteenth-century Germany respectively. But history is decidedly not the defining feature of these novels. Rather, as this chapter shows, all four works are characterized by their bold experimentation with narrative form and style, reflecting an intense concern with profound questions of body, mind and spirit that culminates in Fitzgerald’s haunting masterpiece, the story of the idealized yearning of the German Romantic poet Novalis both for Sophie von Kühn, his ‘heart’s heart’, and for revelation. Through close analysis of Fitzgerald’s methods of research, composition and editing, this chapter proposes fresh ways of thinking about the stylistic means by which these late novels create fictional worlds that expand to fill the reader’s imagination, and even appear to possess an existence independent of the novels themselves.

Critical Writing

This chapter surveys the large body of Fitzgerald’s critical writing, only a fraction of which has been collected and is currently in print. This body of work includes more than fifty book, film and theatre reviews for Punch magazine, more than twenty essays on European art, literature and culture for World Review (the periodical that Fitzgerald co-edited in the early 1950s), and more than 200 reviews of fiction and biography in British and American newspapers, as well as introductions for books and editions, travel essays, art criticism, literary essays and journalistic sketches. The chapter considers the nature of Fitzgerald’s critical sympathies, priorities and tastes, and the marked stylistic continuities between her criticism and fiction. In particular, the chapter notes Fitzgerald’s fascination in her critical writing with what would become two of the most distinctive features of her own writing: a searching appreciation of the psychological and social interplay between fictional characters, and a prose style apparently without art.

Short Stories, Poems, Letters

This chapter reviews the most neglected forms of Penelope Fitzgerald’s writing: her short stories, poems and letters. Although Fitzgerald claimed not to be able to write short stories, the evidence of the ten stories collected in The Means of Escape, and of the other eleven uncollected stories that survive, suggests otherwise. The chapter shows how Fitzgerald’s short fiction shares with her novels themes of misunderstanding, disappointment and loneliness. Other continuities include Fitzgerald’s tragicomic wit, art of compression, and taste for the macabre. Yet the chapter also shows how the stories differ from the novels. The sense of disruption of the accepted order of things is concentrated in the stories to the point of menace. The author’s presence, more pervasive and inescapable in the stories than in the novels, obscures the dividing line between author and narrator. By contrast, Fitzgerald’s handful of poems are surprisingly intimate and self-revealing, confronting the reader with a starker, more private version of Fitzgerald’s authorial persona. The letters, written to family, friends, literary editors and writers, provide a different kind of evidence of Fitzgerald’s sharp wit, intelligence and powers of observation.

Early Novels

This chapter considers the five short novels Fitzgerald wrote between 1977 and 1982: The Golden Child, The Bookshop, Offshore, Human Voices and At Freddie’s. Each of these ‘early’ novels draws upon Fitzgerald’s own life, and all but one contain female protagonists who resemble Fitzgerald herself either in her youth or middle-age. The chapter discusses the origins, themes and style of each novel, noting how each book has been received by critics and general readers since it was first published. The chapter argues that, to a certain extent, the early novels have unjustly been seen as mere apprentice work in preparation for Fitzgerald’s later historical fiction. This perspective risks underrating the earlier works’ particular qualities. These include the deft evocation of wholly believable times and places; finely observed characters swept along on cross-currents of thought, feeling and happenstance; sudden parabolic swerves in mood and story arising from the situations in which people find themselves; dialogue that is by turns oblique, elliptical and heartbreakingly frank; submerged but telling literary and topical allusions; and sharp criticism of cruelty in all its forms and corresponding sympathy for those who suffer from it.

Biographies

This chapter examines Penelope Fitzgerald’s career as a writer of biography. Between 1975 and 1984, Fitzgerald published three group biographies – Edward Burne-Jones, The Knox Brothers, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends – and she began, but eventually gave up, a life of the novelist L. P. Hartley. She also reviewed and wrote introductions for numerous writers’ lives, ranging from canonical figures such as S. T. Coleridge, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to less well-remembered novelists, poets and artists such as Margaret Oliphant, John Lehmann and C. R. Ashbee. The chapter shows how Fitzgerald’s biographies (and especially The Knox Brothers) provide important clues to the distinctive sensibility of her novels. Craftsmanship, skill and labour are rated far above hollow intellectualism or politicking. Fascination with the inner life is handled with restraint, yet underwrites the most poignant moments of characterization. Sorrow at love’s futility in the face of time and fate is treated as comedy, ‘for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?’

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of Penelope Fitzgerald’s life and writing career, showing how her literary sensibility was shaped in different ways by her intellectual and artistic education, her early family life, her career as a teacher and her philosophical and religious beliefs. In answer to the question, ‘How does she do it?’, the chapter suggests that Fitzgerald achieves ‘the simultaneous compression of language and expansion of meaning’ through a distinctive combination of wit, literary compression, and moral purpose. The chapter also touches on Fitzgerald’s place among British and European writers of shorter fiction. It explains the structure of the book, and justifies its method of analysis: namely, the application of Fitzgerald’s critical judgments about other writers to her own work.

Reputation and Influence

This chapter assesses the growth of Penelope Fitzgerald’s literary reputation since her death in 2000, and gauges the nature of her influence on other writers. It weighs up contemporary criticism of her work, and suggests that despite the favourable attention given to her life and writing in recent years, including film and radio adaptations of her novels, and Hermione Lee’s full-length biography, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, Fitzgerald’s place in the canon of twentieth-century British fiction is not necessarily secure. This is partly because of the difficulty of categorizing Fitzgerald’s work. Her style and sensibility have more in common with her chronological peers, such as post-war novelists Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch, than with novelists of the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, reviewers of female ironists such as Fitzgerald tend to overplay the benignity of her fiction, as though subtlety and understatement were incommensurate with the exploration of the major questions of life. The chapter concludes by calling on educators, writers, and publishers to support her legacy by continuing to study, adapt and print her works.