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Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee
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ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’ S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A Best Book of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times
Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography
The acclaimed biographer of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf gives us an intimate portrait of one of the most quietly brilliant novelists of the twentieth century.
Penelope Fitzgerald was a great English writer whose career didn't begin until she was nearly sixty. She would go on to win some of the most coveted awards in literature—the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Now, in an impeccable match of talent between biographer and subject, Hermione Lee, a master biographer and one of Fitzgerald's greatest champions, gives us this remarkable writer’s story. Lee’s critical expertise is on dazzling display on every page, as it illuminates this extraordinary English life. Fitzgerald, born into an accomplished intellectual family, the granddaughter of two bishops, led a life marked by dramatic twists of fate, moving from a bishop’s palace to a sinking houseboat to a last, late blaze of renown. We see Fitzgerald’s very English childhood in the village of Hampstead; her Oxford years, when she was known as the “blonde bombshell”; her impoverished adulthood as a struggling wife, mother and schoolteacher, raising a family in difficult circumstances; and the long-delayed start to her literary career.
Fitzgerald’s early novels draw on her own experiences—working at the BBC in wartime, at a bookshop in Suffolk, at an eccentric stage school in the 1960s—while her later books open out into historical worlds that she, magically, seems to entirely possess: Russia before the Revolution, postwar Italy, Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis. Fitzgerald’s novels are short, spare masterpieces, and Hermione Lee unfurls them here as works of genius. Expertly researched, written out of love and admiration for this wonderful author’s work, Penelope Fitzgerald is literary biography at its finest—an unforgettable story of lateness, persistence and survival.
- Sales Rank: #451578 in Books
- Published on: 2014-11-18
- Released on: 2014-11-18
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.72" w x 6.70" l, 2.12 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 512 pages
Review
“Excellent. . . . Riveting. . . . It’s a cliché of discourse about biographies to remark that a good one will send you racing back to read the subject’s works. In this case, it happens to be true in a mighty way.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“[A] superbly intelligent biography. . . . Remarkable. . . . A revelation. . . . The story that Lee’s biography tells . . . is not about patience on a monument but about talent buried under a heavy plinth, and discovered only just in time.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker
"Lee's book is a championing critical biography giving richly illuminating consideration to each of Fitzgerald's undefinable books. . . . Lee understands the importance of the life of ideas, of intellectual curiosity and imaginative obsession that are as much a part of the novelist's life as love affairs, parenthood, and moving house. . . . A study in imaginative abundance and in connections, of body, mind, and spirit. It is, very movingly, a picture of a whole past life, abounding no doubt in secrets Fitzgerald herself would have liked untold, but telling them with a reverence for her subject that is felt on every page."
—Alan Hollinghurst, The New York Review of Books
“I can’t praise Hermione Lee’s elegant work enough, whether for its clear prose, clever organization (she discusses Fitzgerald’s early novels when relating the events that inspired them), insightful criticism or amusing and horrifying anecdotes. . . . Any admirer of Penelope Fitzgerald’s work—or, for that matter, any passionate reader—will enjoy this capacious, masterly biography. Like its subject’s own late flowering, it is a triumph.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“An extraordinarily fine portrayal of the relationship between this author’s life and her attraction to her chosen subject, in Lee’s words: ‘characters at odds with their world: the depressives, the shy, the unworldly, the emotionally inarticulate’. . . . It is clear from the various sharp remarks reported by Lee, that Fitzgerald knew exactly who she was, and never allowed the circumstances of her life—the blighted prospects, descent into poverty and homelessness, marital trials, crumby jobs, condescension from literary insiders—to blind her to her own gift and greatness.”
— Katherine A. Powers, The Christian Science Monitor
“Lee’s exhaustive research and immense storytelling talent result in a captivating read about a woman who lived most of her life on the sidelines. . . . Lee takes ample time to discuss in depth Fitzgerald’s work in biography and fiction, her struggles with her publishers, her circle of friends and her role as outsider in a sea of younger, better dressed literary wunderkinds. . . . With great respect, and an innate sense of the underappreciated, Lee shines a brilliant light on Fitzgerald’s long life of making do, and making art in the process.”
—Meganne Fabrega, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Gloriously illuminates the separate talents of two distinguished ladies of letters.”
—The Economist
“Be grateful that the life of that elusive, original miracle-worker, the English novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, falls to Hermione Lee, author of masterly lives of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton. . . . Lee’s delicate portrait is entirely in keeping with the spirit of a woman who sneaks the line ‘Writers families, in small houses, suffer greatly’ into an account of her father’s early career, otherwise known as her childhood. The restraint comes off less as deference than solidarity. . . . [Lee] shines a searching light on Fitzgerald’s pages. . . . Lee is hilarious on the descriptions of the writer who comported herself, as Julian Barnes put it, like ‘some harmless jam-making grandmother who scarcely knew her way in the world’. . . . Fitzgerald wrote of the courage of reticence, and Lee has heard her.”
—Stacy Schiff, The New York Times Book Review
“Brilliant . . . Lee catches not only the tempo of each decade, but how values from Fitzgerald’s past constantly inform her present.”
—Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times
“Rarely has a literary biography been more needed or necessary than in Fitzgerald’s case. . . . She was a writer of genius. . . . Lee is as direct as she can be about the episodes and phases of life that Fitzgerald preferred to pass over in silence. Her research is meticulous. She has combed the drafts of unfinished work, publisher’s internal memos, private letters, reviews and more. Her conclusion is a statement of biographical honesty.”
—Ruth Scurr, The Wall Street Journal
“Marvelous. . . . Master biographer Hermione Lee illuminates the life of Fitzgerald. . . . Lee does a brilliant job of revealing Fitzgerald’s method: comprehensive research combined with a self-effacing way of parlaying her hard-won knowledge into elusive stories that seem to take their surroundings casually for granted. She illuminates something similar in Fitzgerald’s own character too—a half-feigned vagueness or dottiness mixed with a tough tenacity that not only made her steady stream of books possible, once she got going, but made them what they were.”
—Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
“Hermione Lee's sensitive, respectful biography traces the life of a woman as elusive and enigmatic as her fiction. . . . [Lee] takes evident pleasure in depicting the fulfilled and happy years before her death in 2000. Yet the most memorable portions of this unsentimental, moving biography chronicle decades of sorrow and struggle, making palpable the weight of experience Fitzgerald transmuted into fiction of such remarkable grace and deceptive ease.”
—Wendy Smith, Newsday
“Thrilling. . . . Pithy. . . . Pleasingly impressionistic. . . . Lee, a long-time fan of Fitzgerald’s, wanted to tell the story of a mysterious and brilliant person who spent a great deal of time pretending to be an absent-minded old lady, losing the trail of anyone who might get to know her, especially, perhaps, a biographer. . . . The expectation for a literary biography is that the secrets come out. But because of the way Fitzgerald obscured, with that performative public personality, who she really was, we have never really known her before now. In the case of this biography, the real secret to come out is Penelope Fitzgerald. . . . The primary result of Lee’s structural conceit is a lightly uncanny doubling of Fitzgerald’s life and her work, lending the biography some of the dramatic irony of a novel. She brings us into the day of Fitzgerald’s Booker win knowing the woman they were mocking that day was no befuddled aunty, but the one-time star of Oxford’s literary scene, rising to the fore at last. . . . That persona was her own long joke on those who taunted her all those years ago. Thanks to Lee’s sumptuous biography, we know just how funny it was.”
—Alexander Chee, Slate
“Literary biography at its best—a masterly discussion of the work of that fine novelist.”
—Penelope Lively
“Deliriously entertaining . . . Beautifully evoked . . . [Lee’s] intense, close-up analyses of each book would have thrilled Fitzgerald.”
—John Walsh, The Sunday Times (London)
“The biography of the year . . . An extraordinary portrait of an English literary life.”
—Robert McCrum, The Observer (London)
“Lee's biography will provide a vivid portrait for those who have not encountered Fitzgerald's work and will prove immensely satisfying for her many fans. . . . Fitzgerald's mastery of phrasing and the beauty of her work should lead readers back to her books, particularly The Bookshop (1977), which was shortlisted for the Booker, or The Blue Flower, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998. Another winning biography from Lee. Those who love Fitzgerald's work will tuck this book right next to her volumes.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In this illuminating biography, critic and scholar Lee (The Novels of Virginia Woolf) shows how Fitzgerald’s characters were drawn not just from real life but from her own life. Fitzgerald was born into a remarkably accomplished and well-connected family of clerics and writers: her father was the editor of the humor magazine Punch; an aunt (Winifred Peck) and uncle (Ronald Knox) were well-known authors; and their circle of acquaintances included Evelyn Waugh, Lytton Strachey, A.A. Milne, and other literary celebrities. ‘Mops’ studied at Oxford and wrote radio plays for the BBC during WWII, but lived mostly in the shadow of her accomplished relatives. She got her chance to shine co-editing the cultural magazine World Review with her husband in 1950, but when the magazine folded in 1953, their lives fell apart and the couple and their three children spent years living in poverty aboard decrepit houseboats in London. Fitzgerald began publishing novels in 1977, at age 61, and Lee does an exceptional job of drawing lines of association between the author’s life and fiction. She mines details from Fitzgerald’s journals and notes to fill in the blanks of her famously self-effacing subject. Her observations have the vitality of Fitzgerald’s own reflective prose, and she writes with sympathy and clarity.”
—Publishers Weekly (boxed, starred)
About the Author
Hermione Lee is a biographer, critic, teacher of literature, and president of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Among her many works are literary biographies of Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald, which won the James Tait Black Prize and the Plutarch Award for Best Biography. She is also the author of critical books on Elizabeth Bowen and Philip Roth. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was made a CBE in 2003 for services to literature, and a DBE in 2013 for services to literary scholarship. She lives in Oxford and Yorkshire.
www.hermionelee.com
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
The Bishops’ Granddaughter
“Must We Have Lives?”
The Old Palace of the Bishop of Lincoln was freezing cold and full of hectic activity in the winter of 1916. The Bishop’s younger daughter, Christina Frances, had said goodbye to her husband, Eddie Knox, in peacetime a journalist and poet, now second lieutenant in the Lincolns, a regiment he had joined because of its connection to her family home. He was waiting to embark for France. They had been married four years and had a three-year-old son, Rawle. Christina was thirty-one, and heavily pregnant. She and Eddie had set up home in rural Hampstead, but because of the war she had moved into the Palace with Rawle and a young nursemaid, to have their second child under her parents’ care.
But the Bishop, Edward Lee Hicks, and his wife, Agnes, were under strain. They had thrown open the Palace at the start of the war to a group of pitiful Belgian refugees, some of whom were still living nearby and doing odd jobs for them. Lincoln, because it had munitions factories, was a target for Zeppelin raids. The town was full of war-wounded and displaced persons and housewives coping with bereavements, air raids and rationing. The Bishop was shocked to see police controlling huge queues for margarine at the shops. He was working so hard—visiting camps and hospitals, protesting against the ill-treatment of conscientious objectors, giving sermons all over the country—that he had come down with a dangerous attack of the flu. Agnes was doing everything.
He was too ill to see Christina when her baby, Penelope Mary Knox, was born, without much fuss, on the Sunday afternoon of 17 December 1916. The Bishop was still not well enough to officiate at the baptism on 18 January 1917. Penelope Mary was baptised by the Dean of Lincoln, with two aunts from either side of her family (Eddie Knox’s sister Ethel and Christina’s sister-in-law Margaret Alison Hicks) as her sponsors. Her given names, though, were never used by the family. She was always called Mops, or Mopsie, or Mopsa.
The great frost lasted into March. The Bishop had barely recovered from his illness, and his granddaughter was only a few months old, when the news came of his oldest son’s death. Christina’s brother Edwin Hicks caught trench fever at Amiens, then died of an attack of meningitis. The Bishop, a pacifist who opposed the war, asked that “nothing about ‘victory’ should be put on the grave of his dead son.” The young widow, Margaret Alison, married for less than two years, bore up valiantly: this was a comfort to his parents. Weeks later, Bishop Hicks and his family turned the Old Palace over to the Red Cross for a hospital, and moved into a much smaller house, cramped quarters for Christina, her parents, her little boy and the new baby.
In September 1917, Eddie Knox, who had been shooting rats in the trenches, observing “ordinary behaviour under terrible conditions” and finding himself unable to write comic pieces from the front line for Punch, was reported missing. He had been shot in the back by a sniper at the Battle of Passchendaele, then found in a shell hole in a pool of blood. He was invalided out, operated on, and brought to a Lincoln hospital to convalesce. Christina, meanwhile, was playing her part on the home front, looking after the children, helping her father, and organising an exhibition of women’s war work at the local branch of Boots. In April 1919, when Eddie was finally demobbed, she was being visited by the Hickses in a Lincoln hospital for women and children, and was said to be only slowly improving; perhaps she had had a miscarriage. Just then, the Bishop, finally worn out, retired from his duties. He died in August 1919. Christina and her children were at his bedside, but Penelope, aged two, was too young to remember. Nevertheless, Bishop Hicks was a figure who mattered to her, among the bishops, missionaries, vicars and priests thickly scattered through her family tree. She liked the sound of him.
Edward Lee Hicks never refused to see anyone who came to his door for help. He was a great enemy of poverty and injustice, having come, while he was at Oxford, under the influence of John Ruskin. Ruskin he admired, not only for his teaching but also for his delight in even the smallest details of life. Ruskin, he said, would describe “with the keenest relish” the joy of shelling peas:
“The pop which assures one of a successful start, the fresh colour and scent of the juicy row within, and the pleasure of skilfully scooping the bouncing peas with one’s thumb into the vessel by one’s side.” I can honestly say that I never shell peas in summer without thinking of Ruskin and of my grandfather.
Shelling peas was the right association, since the Hickses were originally a farming family. So were the Pughs, the Bishop’s maternal family. The Hickses farmed in Wolvercote, a village on the northern edge of Oxford that looks over Port Meadow and the River Thames. They were an old-fashioned Church of England family who didn’t like Methodists coming into the village. But Edward Hicks, the future Bishop’s father, married Catherine Pugh, a strong-minded person who lived to a great age, one of eleven poor children of a musical Welsh father and a devout Wesleyan mother. Because of his marriage Edward Hicks became a Methodist. So his son Edward Lee Hicks grew up with a mixed religious background. Since the Hicks/Knox families contained Quakers, Ulster Protestants, Wesleyans, Evangelicals, Anglicans, Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics, some not on speaking terms with one another, Penelope Fitzgerald developed a belief that religious schisms are pointless, and that all different faiths are really one. She draws attention to this in The Knox Brothers, when calling the faiths that maintained the Knoxes in their dark hours, or “the Bishop of Lincoln’s when his son died in the trenches, or Christina’s when she got a telegram to say that Eddie was missing,” not greater or lesser faiths, “but the same.” Where she agreed with both her grandparents was that faith was necessary for life.
Both Edward Hicks and Catherine Pugh had fathers who died young (Edward’s fell off a ladder pruning a Wolvercote fruit tree), and Edward Hicks, too, died early. An argumentative, musical, generous person, he was a hopeless businessman, who went into debt and died of consumption when his son Edward Lee was nine. Catherine ran the fatherless family, and got Edward Lee into Magdalen School as a chorister. He remembered the shame of being a poor boy at school among richer boys. But he grew up into a scholar and an Oxford don, teaching at Corpus Christi College in the 1860s when Ruskin was there, and when Oxford was, in Fitzgerald’s words, “spiritually in low water” after Newman’s departure and the fiercely divisive Tractarian wars. One of Edward Lee Hicks’s students at Corpus was Edmund Arbuthnott Knox. The Hickses and the Knoxes would keep on interconnecting.
Hicks was ordained in 1870; he was also by then an expert in Greek epigraphy, known at the British Museum for “a happy ability in restoring half-destroyed inscriptions.” So when he was offered the country living of Fenny Compton—a backwater between Banbury and Leamington Spa—for about £600 a year, in 1873, and married a vicar’s daughter, Agnes Trevelyan Smith, he could have settled into a modestly comfortable combination of scholarship, rural ministry and domestic life, with six children (one of whom died in infancy) born between 1878 and 1892.
But Edward Lee Hicks was not an easy-living person. His years at Fenny Compton were a time of agricultural depression and farm workers’ strikes. He sympathised with and worked on behalf of the “land-hungry” labourers. He was a Liberal who believed in grassroots social reform. In the 1880s he and the family moved to a huge, poor parish in Manchester, where he took his double life, as a social reformer and classical scholar, into a tough urban environment. But the move meant that scholarship, the quiet, happy deciphering of Greek inscriptions, had to give way entirely to public work. As Rector at Salford and Canon of Manchester Cathedral, he also wrote polemical pieces—for instance, against the Boer War—for his friend C. P. Scott at the Manchester Guardian. One of the clerics he disagreed with was his ex-pupil Edmund Knox, now his bishop at Manchester, who ran a loud national campaign for the retention of church schools, which were under threat—while Canon Hicks thought that parents should have the right to have their children taught according to their own beliefs.
Some people thought Hicks was too dangerously radical to be made a bishop, and the appointment came late in his life. He had nine years at Lincoln, but he made the most of them. His obituaries called him “a progressive prelate” and “a friend of the poor.” It wasn’t only for his pea shelling that Bishop Hicks admired Ruskin. Ruskin’s dictum—There is no wealth but life—was his own, and he used Ruskin’s attack on the immorality of capitalism, Unto This Last, as a text for his sermons. In “Christianity and Riches,” given at Cambridge in 1913, he preached that the Church suffered from being associated with the comfortable, wealthy classes. But “all must refuse to value anyone the more because of his riches.” His granddaughter, who also admired Ruskin, agreed.
He understood poverty because he had experienced it. Fitzgerald wrote, with feeling, of Bishop Hicks’s family: “Occasionally they would write down a list of all the things they wanted but couldn’t afford, and then burn the piece of paper. This is a device which is always worth trying.” All her life, Christina could never take a taxi without feeling guilty: “cabby” was her word for “expensive.” There were other things, too, she got from her father. Hicks was a feminist, school of John Stuart Mill. He tried unsuccessfully to persuade his fellow bishops to take the clause about “obeying” out of the Marriage Service in the Prayer Book, and he supported women’s suffrage. Christina Hicks inherited those beliefs. Her father gave her, and her brothers and sister, free choices. All the children, Christina wrote eloquently, were encouraged to talk to him as equals. They consulted him as though he were an encyclopaedia. “He never laughed at us, and always contrived to make us feel that we had asked something really interesting.” They were taught that things should be “perfectly simple” but good of their kind—“a book well printed and bound, for instance, that didn’t crack when it was opened.” He liked games, music, walks, funny stories and beautiful objects; he hated tyranny and ugliness. He believed in equal opportunities for boys and girls. When he and Agnes moved to Lincoln in 1910—Christina was then twenty-five, with a university education—she was “offered the choice of going away to make a career for myself, or of being ‘home-daughter,’ whichever I pleased . . . I have never known a daughter so treated, and I have asked many.”
i
We hardly hear that thoughtful, intelligent voice of Christina’s in her daughter’s family memories—either in The Knox Brothers or in other later pieces about her childhood—where the mother mainly exists as a silence or an absence, and appears first as “a gentle, spirited, scholarly, hazel-eyed girl, a lover of poetry and music . . . ready to laugh at herself ” and later as “a quietly spoken woman whom nothing defeated.” In Granny Pugh’s letters to her daughter-in-law Agnes about the children, Christina figures as an admirable granddaughter. In 1896, when she was eleven: “It is grateful to me to hear that Christina is fond of poetry. She always seemed to me a child of promise.” In 1897: “I am so glad that Christina has distinguished herself.” At Withington Girls’ School in Manchester, she took the lead in school plays. In 1904 she got a scholarship for £40 a year to Somerville, one of the first women’s colleges in Oxford.
Her daughter would be amused by the letter which came with the scholarship, “reminding her that she must change her dress for dinner, but ‘must bring no fal-lals, as they only collect dust.’ ” Her tutors thought her “decidedly promising” if a little immature, “animated and intelligent,” with good skills in logic. Helen Darbishire, the Milton and Wordsworth scholar, then senior English Tutor, thought that she wrote with “taste and judgement,” but needed “to cultivate more self-confidence.” She was active on college committees, writing careful minutes as secretary (“Miss Hicks drew attention to complaints which she had received from members whose mackintoshes and umbrellas had been borrowed without permission”) and allowing herself some light moments: “Miss Blake delivered a stirring exhortation on the subject of the Fiction Library” . . . “Rules about Sleeping Out: No one may consciously sleep out in the rain!” She worked hard, went to dances, had a “beau” or two, won the College Coombs prize, made friends with the future novelist Rose Macaulay, and left in 1907 with a Second Class in English, though she could not take her degree until 1921, the year after Oxford at last started awarding degrees to women. Possibly Oxford’s discriminatory attitudes, as well as her father’s support, fuelled Christina’s involvement, in 1908, in demonstrations and mass meetings in support of the Women’s Suffrage Bill.
Her father grieved over Edwin’s death and over the defection of his youngest son, Ned, who, after being wounded on the Somme, converted to Roman Catholicism under the influence of Ronald Knox. But the Bishop was proud of “Tina’s” scholarly achievements. He was close to his younger daughter. When she went abroad after Oxford, he advised her: “Try to use all the chances that come to you of learning about the habits and conditions of the people.” When she asked him about belief, he sent her a long letter, which concluded: “The sound Christian is largely an agnostic.” When he gave her the choice in 1910 of being a “home-daughter” or having a career, she went to teach at St. Felix School in Southwold. The Bishop approved of that as much as he did of her engagement to Eddie Knox, son of his old acquaintance the Bishop of Manchester, in 1912.
Christina and Eddie met in Oxford, probably introduced by her younger brother Ned, who, at Magdalen School, had already brought home an admirer for his sister, his fellow chorister Ivor Novello, who on family holidays followed her about devotedly. Nobody wanted the engagement to be long. One sensible bishop’s wife, Mrs. Hicks, conferred with the other, Mrs. Knox: “Christina says . . . it does seem such a long time till May! She is anxious because he is lonely . . .” They were married in St. Hugh’s Chapel in Lincoln Cathedral on 17 September 1912. It was a family affair.
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39 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Amazing biographer ventures into more challenging territory
By S. McGee
When Penelope Fitzgerald stepped up to collect the Booker Prize (as it then was) for her 1979 novel, Offshore: A Novel, the literary world was taken aback. Not just that crowd favorite (heavily tipped to win by the bookmakers) V.S. Naipaul hadn't claimed one of the world's most prestigious literary prizes, but instead had been pipped at the post by an elderly woman who hadn't begun writing novels until her 60s, but by her appearance -- that of an elderly and perhaps slightly dotty aunt. How could one reconcile that with the work itself, a crisp, elegant and almost-novella like tale of life on board a houseboat in the Thames, filled with wry and sardonic observations on an assortment of extraordinary characters? And how to explain the even more astonishing later works, especially The Beginning of Spring and The Blue Flower: A Novel? While I'm no literary scholar, these are fascinating novels, oblique and tantalizing, owing more, perhaps, to European writers than to the English tradition. Who on earth was Penelope Fitzgerald that she set out to write about Novalis, that 18th century early German Romantic? That's the question I found myself asking while reading the latter novel -- and here, at last, is none other than Hermione Lee to take a stab at answering it.
This biography is a departure for Lee, whose previous big works (and they are BIG, about double the length of this book) have been wonderful, definitive biographies of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton. Tackling Fitzgerald as a subject is a departure: she died in 2000, and given the exhaustive nature of the research and detailed writing, it seems likely that her family asked Lee to undertake this project only a few years later. At the same time, Lee seems to have had surprisingly few resources to draw on for critical passages in Fitzgerald's life. How did she meet her husband, whose irresponsibility would nearly destroy their family (and whose death, it seemed, would finally free Fitzgerald to write)? At a party, is the only answer to have come down to us. Between the loss of many family papers when the barge on which the Fitzgerald clan themselves ended up living in Chelsea at one low point sank, and Fitzgerald's own reluctance to discuss difficult subjects or divulge secrets, much seems to remain unknown, most notably some of the details of Fitzgerald's working methods. How did she assemble those delicate works of art that were her late novels, so distinctive and so unique? I'm still not sure I understand.
What I do understand now is how her upbringing and experiences before she began writing novels all contributed to those works, because Lee does such an excellent job of blending together the chronology of the long years in which she wasn't producing the work for which she is now famous, with references to those novels. In their 30s, financially buffeted, the Fitzgeralds take refuge in Southwold, a seaside town that Penelope later would use as the setting for The Bookshop, perhaps one of her most popular novels, and Lee seizes the opportunity to link the two, showing how the experience planted memories she would draw on decades later. Similarly, it's hard to understand the ethos behind Fitzgerald's writing -- the way she approaches her themes and characters -- without understanding the unique world that produced her, and her own intellectual experiences. And there were revelations here, too. I may think of Fitzgerald as a writer, but she made her first mark on the literary landscape as an editor with her husband, Desmond, of a magazine that published JD Salinger before "Catcher in the Rye" appeared, that was the first publisher of some of Louis MacNeice's poems, and that published writers like Muriel Spark, LP Hartley, Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Cyril Connolly, Henry Miller, Camus...
Another joy were the illustrations, ranging from a blue flower that Desmond picked and pressed for Penelope while on holiday in the 1960s, to drawings by Penelope herself; the cover of "The World Review" and a copy of a girl's comic for which Penelope wrote after the magazine folded.
All writers are elusive subjects, by definition: they choose to interact with the world through their published works. Fitzgerald may have been more elusive than many: those works themselves remain enigmatic, tantalizing me even as they charm me. That has made Lee's task her much more difficult than it was with Woolf, for instance, and resulted in a biography with holes in it where facts (or at least, theories) might otherwise be. For those who have read Fitzgerald's novels, I doubt this will be that much of a hurdle: what is here is so extensive and so lucidly presented (Lee's writing isn't just clear, but fluid and elegant) that I can't imagine emerging without a much clearer grasp of both the woman and her work -- which is what a literary biography is all about, after all. Better yet, this one offers an intriguing bonus in the shape of insight in Penelope Fitzgerald's literary circles, from those of her father (who worked at Punch in the 1920s and onward) to her own work at the BBC and in literary magazines in the 1950s, to her post-literary success on panels of judges for prestigious literary prizes. (Some of those snippets of gossip pulled from her letters and papers are hilarious.) I probably would have found Fitzgerald deeply fascinating and deeply intimidating in real life, but I'm delighted to have "met" her through the pages of this biography.
A side note: I HAVE read several of Fitzgerald's novels, which was why I was eager to read this biography. I note that a number of the reviews awarding this three stars or so at present come from those who are meeting the subject of the biography for the first time here, which is a bit disconcerting. I certainly wouldn't recommend this, or most other literary biographies, to anyone who is unfamiliar with the author's works. Even in the case of Dickens, so much of such a work revolves around the author's writing and what influences will shape it, and if you're not familiar with those works, it's hard to evaluate how well the biographer has accomplished this. You're also much more likely to find the whole discussion of the books boring if you don't know that you like them. Which all boils down to: try a few of Fitzgerald's novels first, before deciding to read this. Frankly, I think that most prospective readers will be drawn to it precisely BECAUSE they have liked "The Bookshop" or "The Blue Flower", but if you haven't read one of 'em and you're reading this, don't hit "buy" on this book yet. Go try the real thing first. They are short novels, accessible in terms of style, but often elliptical in terms of theme and character.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Extremely well researched and complex biography of an enigmatic writer
By Kcorn
I was drawn to this biography because I am a fan of Penelope Fitzgerald, an author who found acclaim only late in her life. It is a stellar work but I strongly recommend reading some of Fitzgerald's novels before tackling this biography. Not only is it far from light reading, it might be inaccessible to those who aren't fans of the author - or at the very least familiar with some of her books.
Author Hermione Lee doesn't just cover the highlights of Fitzgerald's life. Instead, she includes some of the tiniest scraps of information, fascinating for me but perhaps less interesting to those who aren't acquainted with the author's works. Even for her biographer, Fitzgerald was a difficult woman to decipher. As Lee notes, Fitzgerald was often reticent, evasive and secretive. Lee even envisioned Fitzgerald "looking on with reluctance as I trawled through her private papers, her annotations in her books, her notebooks and her manuscripts. " But the family wanted a biography and so they allowed Lee to have access to an extensive amount of material.
The result is an extremely detailed portrait of Fitzgerald, from her tough childhood as the daughter of a man who held her to a high standard to her years as a housewife and mother, her difficult marriage and later success. While some have written that Fitzgerald's career began at sixty, Lee noted that she only became famous in America at the age of eighty and adds that "up till then, her publishing career had been shaky."
While she received her share of positive reviews, her book sales were not stellar and the general public was slow to embrace her work. It was only when publisher Chris Carduff of Houghton Mifflin released The Blue Flower in paperback that her book sales soared. It was a savvy move by Carduff because the book appeared a bargain at $12.00 compared to the usual $24.95 hardcover. It became the book everyone discussed and wanted to read.
The novel focuses on a poet, Georg Friedrich von Hardenberg ( Novalis) and his obsession and determination to wed a 12 year old girl. But that is only a surface summary of a work which defies a simple classification. The Blue Flower has been called surreal, a portrait of German Romanticism, a historic examination of 18th century Germany, magic realism, and more. I think these varied descriptions reveal the difficulty in expressing the "meaning" of this work - and the complexities and challenges of Fitzgerald's novel.
As for this biography, I found it both inspiring and intriguing. I couldn't get enough of every bit of information Lee shared. The book contains a list of Fitzgerald's novels, short stories, essays and letters. There are also extensive notes as well as resources for each chapter (compiled at the back of the book).
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Penelope Fitzgerald: A Vague Life
By R PRIUS
I wasn't really all that familiar with the works of Penelope Fitzgerald. This was actually not as much of a disadvantage as one might think because this is an interesting book about a woman who was forced to deal with what seemed like a life full of challenges and rejections and not only managed to not only survive but also to prevail and rise above it all. Fitzgerald, born Penelope Knox, descended from a long line of people who were seemingly reticent and closed mouthed and rarely revealed much about themselves. What the author had on Fitzgerald came more from others who knew her well because Fitzgerald rarely revealed herself.
The core of this story is Fitzgerald's tumultuous marriage to a man who was a raging alcoholic who dragged his family down. He was incapable of supporting his family and in effect committed them to a life of poverty. At one point they lived on a houseboat on the Thames which sank taking all there belongings along. Thongs eventually escalated to her husband getting nabbed for forgery. Fitzgerald didn't even begin to write professionally until she was past the age of 60. She was a brilliant writer and a genius in lamb's clothing who rarely exposed her brilliance to anyone other than family and friends. Even when a modicum of success approached, she found she had to fight penurious publishers and editors for fair advances and royalties.
In looking at Fitzgerald, the overall lack of information raises red flags but also intrigues the reader with snippets of information that keeps one wondering. I liked the external information culled from others yet found myself somewhat frustrated that so little is revealed about the subject.
I suspect that I would have liked more resolution on Fitgerald's life but it was still an interesting story that left me intrigued yet questioning.
This book is ideally meant for someone who is interested in the writer Fitzgerald, but may leave other readers feeling frustrated.
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