Penelope Fitzgerald, by Hermione Lee

Review by Jackie Wullschlager - FT - 1 November

©Camera Press/Jillian Edelstein

Novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald in 2000

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, RRP£25, 490 pages

Penelope Fitzgerald believed “you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings whom you think are sadly mistaken”. So she wrote lives of Victorian idealists Edward Burne-Jones, Charlotte Mew and the Knox Brothers, who included her father, but she called her fictional characters “exterminatees”, and saw herself as one too.

Hermione Lee recalls that Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, “repeatedly spoke of failure as a theme both of her work and her life”. Yet suddenly, in her seventies, she crafted portrayals of worn-down, well-intentioned lives – the ill-matched, devoted lovers of “innocence”; Moscow businessman Frank, abandoned by his wife, in The Beginning of Spring (1988); decent, earnest physicist Fred Fairly, hero of The Gate of Angels (1990); the romantic poet and his insouciant, dying teenage fiancée in The Blue Flower (1995) – into novels of human engagement and metaphysical power unmatched in late 20th-century British fiction.

Lee elucidates the depth of that achievement, and ties it enthrallingly to a life and personality more complex and difficult than anyone imagined. Julian Barnes once pinpointed Fitzgerald’s courteous, elusive self-presentation as “a jam-making grandmother who scarcely knew her way in the world”. In a perfect literary biography, Lee plumbs the creative mind beneath that persona, tracing the metamorphosis of messy experience into crystalline art.
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