Penelope Fitzgerald
Encyclopedia
Penelope Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning English
novelist, poet
, essayist and biographer. In 2008, The Times
included her in a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
editor Edmund Knox
and Christina Hicks, one of the first woman students at Oxford. She was the niece of theologian and crime writer Ronald Knox
, cryptographer Dilly Knox
and Bible scholar Wilfred Knox. Fitzgerald later wrote,
She was educated at Wycombe Abbey
and Somerville College, Oxford
; she worked for the BBC
during World War II
. In 1941, she married Desmond Fitzgerald, an Irish soldier; they had three children, a son and two daughters. In the 1960s, she taught at the Italia Conti Academy
, a drama school and at Queen's Gate School for Girls; she also worked in a bookshop in Southwold
, Suffolk
. For a time she lived in Battersea
on the Thames, on a houseboat that reportedly sank twice.
(1833–1898). This was followed two years later by The Knox Brothers, a joint biography of her father and uncles in which she managed to never mention herself by name.
Later in 1977, she published her first novel, The Golden Child, a comic murder mystery with a museum setting inspired by the Tutankhamun
mania earlier in the decade. The novel is said to have been written to amuse her terminally-ill husband, who died in 1976.
Over the next five years she published four novels, each connected in some way with her life experience. The Bookshop (1978), which was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize, concerned a struggling bookstore in the fictional East Anglia
n town of Hardborough; set in 1959, the novel includes as a pivotal event the shop's decision to stock Lolita
.
Fitzgerald won the Booker Prize with 1979's Offshore
, a novel that takes place among Battersea houseboat community in 1961. Human Voices is a fictionalized account of wartime life at the BBC, while At Freddie's depicts life at a drama school.
(1869–1928), she began a series of novels with a variety of historic
settings.
First was Innocence (1986), in Italy
in the 1950s, the story of a romance between the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat
and a doctor from a southern Communist family. The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci
(1891–1937) appears as a minor character.
The Beginning of Spring (1988) takes place in Moscow
in 1913, examining the world just before the Russian Revolution
through the family and work troubles of a British small businessman who was born and raised in Russia
.
The Gate of Angels (1990), about a young Cambridge University physicist who falls in love with a nurse after a bicycle accident, is set in 1912, a time when physics is about to enter a similarly revolutionary period.
Fitzgerald's final novel, The Blue Flower, published in 1995, centres on the 18th century German
poet and philosopher Novalis
, and his love for what is portrayed as a rather ordinary child. Other historical figures, like the poet Goethe
and philosopher Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel
, feature in the story. The book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award
1997, has been called Fitzgerald's masterpiece. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/13/reviews/970413.13hofmant.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,216535,00.html
In 1999 it was adapted and dramatised for BBC Radio by Peter Wolf.
http://www.radiolistings.co.uk/programmes/b/bl/blue_flower__the.html
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.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
novelist, poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, essayist and biographer. In 2008, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
included her in a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Early life
She was the daughter of PunchPunch (magazine)
Punch, or the London Charivari was a British weekly magazine of humour and satire established in 1841 by Henry Mayhew and engraver Ebenezer Landells. Historically, it was most influential in the 1840s and 50s, when it helped to coin the term "cartoon" in its modern sense as a humorous illustration...
editor Edmund Knox
E. V. Knox
Edmund George Valpy Knox , was a poet and satirist who wrote under the pseudonym Evoe. He was editor of Punch 1932-1949, having been a regular contributor in verse and prose for many years....
and Christina Hicks, one of the first woman students at Oxford. She was the niece of theologian and crime writer Ronald Knox
Ronald Knox
Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was an English priest, theologian and writer.-Life:Ronald Knox was born in Kibworth, Leicestershire, England into an Anglican family and was educated at Eton College, where he took the first scholarship in 1900 and Balliol College, Oxford, where again...
, cryptographer Dilly Knox
Dilly Knox
Alfred Dillwyn 'Dilly' Knox CMG was a classics scholar at King's College, Cambridge, and a British codebreaker...
and Bible scholar Wilfred Knox. 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. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1582430950
She was educated at Wycombe Abbey
Wycombe Abbey
Wycombe Abbey is an independent girls' boarding school situated in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England. It is academically one of the top schools in the United Kingdom, and the top girls' boarding school...
and Somerville College, Oxford
Somerville College, Oxford
Somerville College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England, and was one of the first women's colleges to be founded there...
; she worked for the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. In 1941, she married Desmond Fitzgerald, an Irish soldier; they had three children, a son and two daughters. In the 1960s, she taught at the Italia Conti Academy
Italia Conti Academy
The Italia Conti Academy is a theatre arts training school based in London. It was founded in 1911 by actress Italia Conti...
, a drama school and at Queen's Gate School for Girls; she also worked in a bookshop in Southwold
Southwold
Southwold is a town on the North Sea coast, in the Waveney district of the English county of Suffolk. It is located on the North Sea coast at the mouth of the River Blyth within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The town is around south of Lowestoft and north-east...
, Suffolk
Suffolk
Suffolk is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in East Anglia, England. It has borders with Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south. The North Sea lies to the east...
. For a time she lived in Battersea
Battersea
Battersea is an area of the London Borough of Wandsworth, England. It is an inner-city district of South London, situated on the south side of the River Thames, 2.9 miles south-west of Charing Cross. Battersea spans from Fairfield in the west to Queenstown in the east...
on the Thames, on a houseboat that reportedly sank twice.
Literary career
She launched her literary career in 1975, at the age of 58, when she published a biography of Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-JonesEdward Burne-Jones
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...
(1833–1898). This was followed two years later by The Knox Brothers, a joint biography of her father and uncles in which she managed to never mention herself by name.
Later in 1977, she published her first novel, The Golden Child, a comic murder mystery with a museum setting inspired by the Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun , Egyptian , ; approx. 1341 BC – 1323 BC) was an Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th dynasty , during the period of Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom...
mania earlier in the decade. The novel is said to have been written to amuse her terminally-ill husband, who died in 1976.
Over the next five years she published four novels, each connected in some way with her life experience. The Bookshop (1978), which was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize, concerned a struggling bookstore in the fictional East Anglia
East Anglia
East Anglia is a traditional name for a region of eastern England, named after an ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the Kingdom of the East Angles. The Angles took their name from their homeland Angeln, in northern Germany. East Anglia initially consisted of Norfolk and Suffolk, but upon the marriage of...
n town of Hardborough; set in 1959, the novel includes as a pivotal event the shop's decision to stock Lolita
Lolita
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian...
.
Fitzgerald won the Booker Prize with 1979's Offshore
Offshore (novel)
Offshore is a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. It won the Booker Prize for that year. It recalls her time spent on boats in Battersea by the Thames. The novel centralizes around the idea of liminality, expanding upon it to include the notion: 'liminal people,' people who do not belong to the land or...
, a novel that takes place among Battersea houseboat community in 1961. Human Voices is a fictionalized account of wartime life at the BBC, while At Freddie's depicts life at a drama school.
Historical novels
At that point, Fitzgerald has said, she "had finished writing about the things in my own life, which I wanted to write about." http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,216535,00.html After writing a biography of the poet Charlotte MewCharlotte Mew
Charlotte Mary Mew was an English poet, whose work spans the cusp between Victorian poetry and Modernism.She was born in Bloomsbury, London the daughter of the architect Frederick Mew, who designed Hampstead town hall and Anna Kendall. She attended Lucy Harrison's School for Girls and lectures at...
(1869–1928), she began a series of novels with a variety of historic
Historical novel
According to Encyclopædia Britannica, a historical novel is-Development:An early example of historical prose fiction is Luó Guànzhōng's 14th century Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which covers one of the most important periods of Chinese history and left a lasting impact on Chinese culture.The...
settings.
First was Innocence (1986), in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
in the 1950s, the story of a romance between the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat
Aristocracy (class)
The aristocracy are people considered to be in the highest social class in a society which has or once had a political system of Aristocracy. Aristocrats possess hereditary titles granted by a monarch, which once granted them feudal or legal privileges, or deriving, as in Ancient Greece and India,...
and a doctor from a southern Communist family. The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian writer, politician, political philosopher, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime...
(1891–1937) appears as a minor character.
The Beginning of Spring (1988) takes place in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
in 1913, examining the world just before the Russian Revolution
Russian Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. The Tsar was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of February 1917...
through the family and work troubles of a British small businessman who was born and raised in Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
.
The Gate of Angels (1990), about a young Cambridge University physicist who falls in love with a nurse after a bicycle accident, is set in 1912, a time when physics is about to enter a similarly revolutionary period.
Fitzgerald's final novel, The Blue Flower, published in 1995, centres on the 18th century German
Germans
The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....
poet and philosopher Novalis
Novalis
Novalis was the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg , an author and philosopher of early German Romanticism.-Biography:...
, and his love for what is portrayed as a rather ordinary child. Other historical figures, like the poet Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
and philosopher Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel was a German poet, critic and scholar. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was a critical leader of German Romanticism.-Life and work:...
, feature in the story. The book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award
National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....
1997, has been called Fitzgerald's masterpiece. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/13/reviews/970413.13hofmant.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,216535,00.html
In 1999 it was adapted and dramatised for BBC Radio by Peter Wolf.
http://www.radiolistings.co.uk/programmes/b/bl/blue_flower__the.html
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.
Biographies
- Edward Burne-JonesEdward Burne-JonesSir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...
(1975) - The Knox Brothers (1977)
- Charlotte MewCharlotte MewCharlotte Mary Mew was an English poet, whose work spans the cusp between Victorian poetry and Modernism.She was born in Bloomsbury, London the daughter of the architect Frederick Mew, who designed Hampstead town hall and Anna Kendall. She attended Lucy Harrison's School for Girls and lectures at...
and Her Friends: With a Selection of Her Poems (1984)
Novels
- The Golden Child (1977)
- The BookshopThe BookshopThe Bookshop is a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. The novel centres around a woman opening a bookshop in a small town in the late 1950s....
(1978) - OffshoreOffshore (novel)Offshore is a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. It won the Booker Prize for that year. It recalls her time spent on boats in Battersea by the Thames. The novel centralizes around the idea of liminality, expanding upon it to include the notion: 'liminal people,' people who do not belong to the land or...
(1979) - Human Voices (1980)
- At Freddie's (1982)
- Innocence (1986)
- The Beginning of Spring (1988)
- The Gate of Angels (1990)
- The Blue Flower (1995, UK, 1997, US)
Essays and Reviews
- A House of Air (US title: The Afterlife) edited by Terence Dooley, with an introduction by Hermione Lee (2005)
Letters
- So I Have Thought of You. The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald edited by Terence Dooley, with a preface by A. S. Byatt (2008)
External links
- "Penelope Fitzgerald", by Harriet Harvey-Wood, The Guardian, May 3, 2000.
- "How did she do it?", Julian BarnesJulian BarnesJulian Patrick Barnes is a contemporary English writer, and winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, for his book The Sense of an Ending...
, The Guardian, July 26, 2008 - "The Unknown Penelope Fitzgerald", Edmund Gordon,TLS, June 30, 2010
- "Fitzgerald, Penelope", Britannica Student Encyclopedia (2006).
- Meet the Writers: Penelope Fitzgerald, Barnes and Noble.
- Penelope Fitzgerald Collection, Additional Papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at AustinUniversity of Texas at AustinThe University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...
- "Penelope Fitzgerald: Dedicated to Her Life and Work"