Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life
- ISBN-10
- 0385352352
- ISBN-13
- 9780385352352
- Category
- Biography & Autobiography
- Pages
- 512
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2014-11-18
- Publisher
- Vintage
- Author
- Hermione Lee
Description
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.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
The Bookshop
By Penelope FitzgeraldShortlisted for the Booker Prize. In a small East Anglian town, Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop.
-
Offshore
By Penelope FitzgeraldOn the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of eccentrics lives in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another. How each of their lives complicates the others is the stuff of this perfect little novel.
-
The Beginning of Spring
By Penelope FitzgeraldFrom a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, this novel, with a new introduction by Andrew Miller, author of Pure, is filled with “writing so precise and lilting it can make you shiver” (Los Angeles Times). “Fitzgerald was ...
-
The Blue Flower
By Penelope FitzgeraldThe irrationality of love, the transfiguration of the commonplace, the clarity of purpose that comes with knowing one's own fate-these are the themes of this beguiling novel, themes treated with a mix of wit, grace, and mischievous humor ...
-
So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald
By Penelope FitzgeraldA fascinating collection of letters from the great English novelist – and prolific correspondent – Penelope Fitzgerald
-
Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald
By Peter WolfePeter Wolfe. manifestations of God's will ” ( 98 ) . The mind orders , interprets , and evaluates the data our ... however vital it is to William James's brand of pragmatism , “ a rational system for measuring happiness ” ( 154 ) .
-
At Freddie's
By Penelope FitzgeraldBasing this intimate novel on her experiences teaching at London’s Italia Conti stage school, Penelope Fitzgerald spins the story of Jonathan, a child actor of great promise, and his slick rival Mattie; Joey Blatt, who has wicked plans to ...
-
The Gate of Angels
By Penelope FitzgeraldYoung Fred Fairly, a junior fellow at St. Angelicus College in 1912 Cambridge, falls in love with the dangerously mysterious Daisy, whom he awakens next to one morning after a freak accident
-
Innocence
By Penelope FitzgeraldFrom a winner of multiple major literary awards who was called “the best English novelist of her time” by Julian Barnes, Innocence is a novel “not just about Italians in love but of living and loving for all humans” (The Times). ...
-
Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction
By Christopher J. KnightChristopher J. Knight’s Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction is a study of the British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 – 2000), attending to her nine novels, especially as viewed through the lens both of "late style" (she ...