From the margins: Hermione Lee on Penelope Fitzgerald

Since her death ten years ago this month, Penelope Fitzgerald's reputation has grown steadily. Once dismissed as a minor lady writer, she is now recognised as one of the finest British novelists of the last century. Her biographer Hermione Lee has been granted access to her manuscripts, letters and, best of all, her library of books with their many personal annotations

Hermione Lee, The Guardian, Saturday 3 April 2010
 

 Penelope Fitzgerald, that quiet genius of late-20th-century English fiction, who was born during the Great War at the end of 1916, began to publish in 1975. Over the next quarter of a century, she wrote the nine novels, three biographies (of Edward Burne-Jones, Charlotte Mew and the Knox brothers, her father and uncles), and the many essays and reviews that brought her such critical acclaim and a devoted following. In 1995, her haunting masterpiece, The Blue Flower, made her famous in her 80s. Since her death in 2000, the publication of her stories (The Means of Escape), essays (A House of Air) and selected letters (So I Have Thought of You), brought out by her executor and son-in-law, Terence Dooley, and by HarperCollins, have sustained her posthumous reputation.
And that reputation has shifted, during and after her lifetime. When Offshore, her novel about 1960s life on the Thames river-boats, won the Booker prize in 1979, she was treated dismissively as a minor lady writer with quirky, poignant comic talents – a kind of lesser Barbara Pym – who had unaccountably won out over VS Naipaul. It took some time for readers to recognise the power, the subtlety, the absolute originality, the strangeness, the wisdom and the depth of Fitzgerald's work.

I am writing Penelope Fitzgerald's biography, and her family has trustingly let me loose on those materials of hers that they still possess. (An incalculable slice of her life's record went down with Grace, the Thames barge which inspired Offshore, when it sank in the early 1960s. Much of her written archive is in the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities in Austin, Texas, some of it sold by Fitzgerald in 1989, some later.) What I am looking at is a biographer's dream. There are boxes, shelves and drawers-full of photograph albums, family documents, fragments of early drafts much crossed out and scribbled over, fascinating plot summaries and sketches for stories and novels that never came to fruition, research notes for an unwritten biography of her friend LP Hartley and everything from birthday cards and bills to invitations and vaccination certificates.
The family's archive – which offers the delight, and the challenge, of not having been immaculately sorted and catalogued, as it is in Texas – suggests to me a person at once harum-scarum and duty-bound, distractable and resolute. Rather as in Virginia Woolf's archives (which has dog-prints on some of the manuscript pages, or sketches for improvements to Monk's House on the back of notes for an essay on Henry James), there are signs of improvisation everywhere. Check-lists of possible speakers for a lecture programme Fitzgerald is organising are kept on the outside flap of a dog-eared manila file; notes for a review are scribbled sideways on an official notice from BT; the year's appointments are put in, with many loops and arrows and squiggles, all over a series of small wall calendars. Women writers, as she often used to say in interviews, are always being interrupted.
The full piece by Hermione Leet at The Guardian online.