1916: Penelope Fitzgerald - Resources and General Discussion

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 – 2000)

Penelope Fitzgerald published her first novel in 1977, at the age of 60, when she published The Golden Child, a comic murder mystery. Over the next five years she published four novels, each connected in some way with her own experiences. After 1984, she began a series of novels with a variety of historic settings. Fitzgerald's final novel, The Blue Flower, published in 1995, was named as one of "the ten best historical novels" by The Observer in 2012. In 2008, The Times included her in a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Novels

The Golden Child (1977)
The Bookshop (1978)
Offshore (1979)
Human Voices (1980)
At Freddie's (1982)
Innocence (1986)
The Beginning of Spring (1988)
The Gate of Angels (1990)
The Blue Flower (1995)

Short story collections

The Means of Escape (2000)

Following a discussion of Fitzgerald and twentieth century English writers on another thread, I resolved to read her. Last week I went to my semi local library only to discover that it did not have any of her books! This is possibly a good excuse to actually acquire one.

Many of Penelope Fitzgerald's novels are not very thick, although I felt reading them with attention took time. Then, too, my attention wandered.

Reading reviews on LT, it is obvious that readers are quite divided as to the merits of the work. Some readers are very enthusiastic, while others are not impressed at all. The line of division seems sharper than in the work of other authors.

>2 SassyLassy: Not just one but three! Check out Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring (Everyman's Library) and The Bookshop / The Gate of Angels / The Blue Flower (Everyman's Library). These two three-fers are both available on Amazon, reasonably priced, and you're getting a nice Everyman binding at a lower price than it would take to buy three paperbacks. (I probably bought mine on ABE.)

Stay away from her short stories (ETA: unless you eventually want to get to them for the sake of completeness). They're pointless in their plots and themes. Oh, and an additional ETA: On the stories, make sure you buy the paperback, not the original hardcover. The paperback has a couple extra stories in it that the hardcover doesn't.

The Blue Flower seems to be her most popular. It's a biographical novel of the German romantic Novalis. Or the six novels I've read (i.e., the two Everyman three-fers), I thought The Blue Flower was the weakest and that it may get all the attention it gets only because it was her swan song. Of the six, my tops were Human Voices and Offshore, probably Offshore especially.

I do want to get around to the other three novels, because I have the relatively new biography by Hermione Lee and Fitzgerald's canon is small enough that you can really go for completeness.

Based on my disappointed reading of three novels by Penelope Fitzgerald, I have decided not to read Innocence, which I had on my TBR pile.

However, based on reviews on LT, I have kept, and am planning to read:

* Offshore

* The Beginning of Spring

* The Blue Flower