How Penelope Fitzgerald became a late blooming novelist.

“It is a peculiar thing to take a step forward in middle age, but having done it I don’t intend to retreat.”

Several early readers of Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success have told me they wanted to hear more about the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is one of my favourite writers. I have loved her novels and biographies ever since I first discovered The Bookshop on a hot and boring afternoon in Cambridge fifteen years ago. I read them again while I was recovering from chemotherapy a few years ago. In the final edit of the book, Fitzgerald has a short section. This is the full chapter, which I didn’t have room for. It’s long for a Substack post, but if there are any readers who will appreciate an in-depth discussion of this great writer it is surely all of you. (There are over a hundred footnotes for this chapter but it is too laborious to recreate them all in Substack. So if you want the references, email me and I’ll send you the original document.)

And if you want to know more about other late bloomers, pre-order Second Act today.

Amazon UK. | Amazon US. | Amazon Canada.

---

It is a mistake to think there is only one explanation for who we are and what happens to us.

Penelope Fitzgerald was a novelist of genius. In the 1980s and 1990s she wrote some of the great fiction of the twentieth century. She won the Booker Prize in 1979 (and was nominated another three times) and the American National Books Critics Circle Award in 1998. Philip Hensher said, after she died, “Of all the novelists of the last quarter-century, she has the most unarguable claim on greatness.” To A.S. Byatt, she was “Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention.” Robert McCrum included her in his list of the hundred best novels. Despite the fact that she initially had to endure the sort of reviews women were given in the 1980s (Valentine Cunningham called The Bookshop “anguished women’s fiction”) her reputation has grown since she died in 2000 and she is being realised as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

Penelope Fitzgerald had been expected to be a prodigy. She was a Knox, a family of writers, thinkers, code breakers, and priests. It was competitive and intellectual. She went to the same Oxford college as her mother (who died when she was eighteen), and wrote when she went down that she was ready to start writing. The fact that she was fifty-eight, rather than twenty-one, when her first book came out is the big mystery of her life. Why did she start so late?

Two basic answers have been given to this question. The first is men: her husband was a hindrance, emotionally and financially. His drinking, a failed career at the bar, and an erratic life caused by the pursuit of creditors, left Fitzgerald with little time or energy for writing. For many years she slept on a sofa bed in the sitting room. And her intense childhood might have been a burden. In support of this, we might cite the fact that she began her first book just after her father died and her second as her husband lay dying. 

The other answer given is that she wasn’t, in fact, such a late starter. Critics point to her childhood stories, anonymous reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, her probable contributions to Desmond’s history of the Irish Guards, and the literary magazine she and Desmond ran together when the children were little. There were also four short stories she wrote earlier in life: two as a young child, two in the 1950s when she was a mother. (Fitzgerald wrote very few short stories overall.) We know about these from a notebook entry where she listed them with dates in 1997, when she was eighty-one. The title of the first story on the list, written aged six, was later lightly crossed out. As an undergraduate, she wrote brief paragraph length parodies of Victorian and Edwardian fiction along with some other contributions to the university magazine. It also seems likely that she published a short story under her husband’s name in 1951, but this is impossible to verify. Taken together these are meant to provide an explanation for the fact that Penelope started writing fiction when most other people start retiring. The most recent critical study, part of the Writers at Work series, manages to take both of these standard lines that Desmond held her back and that she wasn’t a late starter at all.

This matters because Fitzgerald’s work is deeply biographical. Her early books, The Bookshop, Offshore, At Freddies, Human Voices, have obvious roots in her own life. The children’s names in Offshore are remarkably close to her own daughters’ names, and the vivid, detailed stories about them are thought to be accurate representations of the state of the family. (In the manuscript, Fitzgerald used her own children’s names throughout.) While the later books are based on immense, detailed research, there are clear resonances with her life and earlier work, such as the state of the marriage in The Beginning of Spring, or the discussion of materialism which occurred first in The Bookshop. Fitzgerald believed in poltergeists and was a quietly, but deeply, religious person. Her life was transmogrified into art. Even for those late novels, Fitzgerald’s life experiences are essential. She could not have written them as a younger woman. And not just because she was reshaping and reworking her experiences. Her ethical views were profoundly informed by her experiences. 

In one interview she made a remark usually thought to be cryptic, but which we might see as a plain, factual statement, almost a double-bluff: ‘I think you can write at any time of your life.’ Without dismissing the other explanations of Fitzgerald’s lateness, it is time to start taking this one more seriously. Her talents bloomed best late in life. Critics often see her public statements as a pose: she pretended to be an old English lady, not a steely novelist of genius. In fact, she was both. Why must these identities be incompatible? Fitzgerald inherited the culture of understatement that her father and uncles had learned at Eton. This wasn’t just a decoy. She told Peter Lennon in 1998, when he accused her of being modest, ‘all modesty is considered false modesty… I don’t really think it is modesty, I think it is a temperament, that you feel you are either one of life’s winners or life’s losers.’ Lennon decided that labels like modesty were insufficient. Instead, he said she had an “alert repose.” 

It is difficult to take her statement that ‘you can write at any time in your life’ at face value precisely because she lived such a turbulent life. (Also because at other times she said it was for other reasons, such as because the children had grown up. Her comments in interviews were often ironic or evasive.) The circumstances of her marriage make her a prime example of a woman born during the First World War held back because she was a woman. The presence of some juvenalia and early reviews cannot justify this. Most people who write anonymous reviews for the TLS don’t become genius novelists. This looks at her life backwards. One of the remarkable things about Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life is the way it shows that until her late thirties, when the children were young, Fitzgerald lived an interesting, bohemian, Hampstead life, until the money and credit ran out. It was just one that didn’t involve writing any fiction. 

Not until The Bookshop (published in 1978 when Fitzgerald was 62) did Fitzgerald produce a serious work of fiction. She had her children in her thirties, and once she started teaching she could, presumably, have made time to write, as writers like William Golding did, during school hours. Not all the women novelists of the twentieth century lived easy lives. As well as the vicissitudes of her life, her father, and her marriage, there must be something about Fitzgerald herself that explains her late start. We risk not taking her seriously if we think that a difficult marriage and a teaching job are enough to turn a potential genius into a mute inglorious Milton. Of course, she might have failed. There are times when it seems as if life might have got her down for good. There is a long unwritable history of great talent failing to prosper. That is exactly why Fitzgerald’s story is so important. 

When she interviewed the South African novelist Christopher Hope in 1989, just after she had published the first of her four great historical novels, Fitzgerald said, in a quiet aside, ‘Comedy is a very much more cruel thing than tragedy.’ This aphorism applies to Fitzgerald’s life, as well as her fiction. Like a comedy, it seems to have a happy resolution. The disorder and confusion of her early life are turned into a series of highly respected, successful novels. But tragedy has a release. There is an endpoint. In her own life, Penelope Fitzgerald was often trapped with no sight of how things would be resolved. Her characters are often in a similar position. Wendy Lesser compares her work to Vermeer, who shows us a snapshot that ‘feels like an eternity’. The endings of The Bookshop, Offshore, and The Beginning of Spring are deeply ambivalent. There is no sign things are guaranteed to get better, even though the disasters have, perhaps, been avoided. It is like watching a couple drive off leaving their wedding guests feeling uneasy about the suitability of the match. In the margins of her copy of Middlemarch, Fitzgerald wrote, ‘The characters’ prospects narrow as the novel closes.’ She wrote that in her fifties, when her husband Desmond had been disbarred for stealing money, when she lived in a council flat after her houseboat had sunk, and when she had taken on laborious teaching work, to keep the family financially stable. It is difficult not to see it as a personal comment as well as a literary one. 

If we can stop seeing Fitzgerald as ‘late’, and appreciate the role her life played in the development of her moral views, we might see that her fiction arrived at the right juncture. Yes she finally had the mental space to write (often scribbling on the backs of envelopes in the staff room), but she had also lived a life that enabled her to write a sort-of tragi-comic wisdom literature. 

Her life was spent immersed in European culture. After Desmond got disbarred and became a travel agent’s clerk, she went on package holidays which he could book for them. They sat in the rafters at the opera with their own sandwiches. As a teacher, the books she most admired and kept coming back to were works like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce. From Fitzgerald’s annotated teaching books, Lee gleaned the details of Fitzgerald’s second, lifelong education. This long accretion of knowledge is something separate from her childhood and Oxford education, and is an essential part of the explanation to the question, ‘How did she do it?’ If we want to understand how she created what Wendy Lesser calls the Russianness and Germanness of her late books, we have to look to her life as a teacher, student, and traveller, not just as a put-upon wife of squashed brilliance. Both stories are true.

We should no more assume these novels were ready and waiting to be written if only it were not for the demands of family life than we should explain the fact that Montaigne started writing when he did because the world was keeping him busy as a bureaucrat before. The time they spent living first was an essential part of what made them both great writers. The other explanations slightly overlook the fact that both Penelope and Desmond were hapless, and simply bad at living. 

Ultimately, the biggest influence on her fiction was something she could only learn by experience. Who knows, if she had been a prodigy, she might not have been any good. As she wrote in Offshore: ‘not being wanted is a positive condition.’ Reviewing The Gate of Angels, Victoria Glendinning drew the lesson that it is a mistake to think ‘there is only one explanation for who we are and what happens to us.’

It is time to apply that lesson to Fitzgerald’s own life.

---

A kitchen-table novelist

At 106 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, a part of west London where artists, thinkers, and writers have often lived, sixty houseboats are moored on the river Thames. There is a persistent smell of river, a mix of salt and dank. Birds pick at the low tide detritus: ravens, geese, moorhens, and pigeons. Behind the moorings are the tall towers of the World’s End housing estate; opposite the neat, well-kept boats are glass blocks of flats. It wasn’t like that in 1960 when Penelope Fitzgerald and her family moved into a damp, leaky houseboat called Grace. What does remain, apart from the terraced houses, the smell, and the birds, is the Lots Road power station and, on the opposite bank, St Mary’s Battersea, an eighteenth century church whose quoins shine in the sun.

She wrote a portrait of life on the river, twenty years later, in Offshore, a novel which ends with a flood; in reality, after three years, the Fitzgeralds’ houseboat sank. This was fitting. Desmond was drunk and disbarred. They had left London to avoid creditors and could only afford to return to the boat. Penelope had a teaching job to provide the family with more income than Desmond could manage and to compensate for how much he spent on drinking. Their whole lives seemed to be sinking.

This is not how she had started. From letters to her university friend Hugh Lee, we can see glimpses of her life as a young graduate in 1939, twenty-one years before she lived on the boat. We see her going to the ballet with friends, going through several “not very serious engagements”, going to a “dreadful diplomatic party”, going to the country to “get some air”; but we do not see her writing. When she does mention writing she says, “it is one of my minor ambitions to write as good letters as you do.” In 1940 she moved from working for the civil service to the BBC. It was a demanding position. “I have had to sign their grasping contract which says that I have to devote all my time attention and skills, within reasonable limits, to the service of the Corporation.” 

This might indicate the strain of her work (she did have to sleep there sometimes) or it might simply be part of a general unworldliness about Fitzgerald. She wrote to her editor in 1979, “I’m not the sort of person who ever has any money.” In 1999 she wrote to another editor, in a discussion of copyright, “I feel this paragraph makes me sound stupider than I am. But I’m just no good at business.” The main character in The Bookshop, Florence, thinks that if she always knew where she was “down to the last three farthings” as she ought to, to keep the accounts of her business, “she would not have the courage to carry on for another day.” It’s possible to overstate this side of Fitzgerald. Her editor Stuart Priffit said, ‘you could sometimes feel she was impractical but then she would cut through in the most direct way and showed she knew exactly what was going on.’ Nonetheless, Fitzgerald was so unversed in money her daughters didn’t think she knew what a mortgage was. She describes a contract between two bookstores, where one supplies the other with books for a small lending library, as “suggestive of a moral philosophy, or the laws of an ideal state, rather than a business transaction.” She thought money was a “tedious and ungetroundable problem”. Her PR man, she said, “absolutely despairs of me, but it is no good pretending to be what you are not.” 

Her impracticality ran deep. She once couldn’t change a typewriter ribbon correctly, even though “the booklet says, in four languages, that it’s a very simple operation.” It is quite likely, however, that she could read all four languages. When she won the Booker Prize she said she would use the money to buy an iron and a typewriter, an example of what many see as her pose as a little old lady. Her reasons for buying the typewriter were revealing though, “It’s important to have an electric one, you see, with a self threading ribbon, so you don’t get your fingers dirty.” This sort of thing was a pose to disarm interviewers, but it was also based in reality.

She also called life at the BBC “not exactly tedious” but depressing: “I have to eat all the time to keep my spirits up.” She didn’t lack material to write about in her twenties: her time at the BBC was the basis of her fourth book Human Voices, written when she was sixty-three. She stopped working for the BBC in 1945. She was writing reviews for Punch and scripts for the BBC. She was well regarded but some of her work started to come in below her usual quality. Desmond came home with war trauma, waking in the night screaming. Penelope had a miscarriage and a baby that died shortly after birth. She was thirty-one when her first surviving child was born. Lee says of Fitzgerald’s sub-par work, “there were signs of strain.” No wonder she was a pessimist. She wrote to her daughter over thirty years later, “you’ve often told me that I’m an old bag, who says nothing will turn out well.” This is a strand of thought that developed throughout her life. Writing to a friend about her husband Desmond coming back at the end of the war with jaundice (they married in 1942) she said: “it’s a mistake to look forward to anything too much in this world.”

The big question hanging over this period is whether she would have started writing fiction if it weren’t for the strain of marrying Desmond. Hermione Lee thinks Fitzgerald showed all the signs of someone who would have started writing in their thirties. Of course, Penelope was writing: scripts, film reviews, science and children’s programmes, and a special for Woman’s Hour. She took this work seriously. In 1950, the Fitzgeralds took on the editorship of a literary magazine. They also moved house and decorated it fashionably, with black walls and ceramics, some of them her own. She was taking pottery lessons in Hampstead and practising her drawing. She was regarded by acquaintances as a knowledgeable, artistic, and literary person. It is a mistake to think that there was no creative time or space available to Penelope at this period. 

Nor should Desmond be blamed, or not entirely. The novelist Philip Hensher, reviewing Lee’s biography, said “The name of the catastrophe was Desmond. Though plausible and, by many accounts, personally charming, Desmond was a feckless alcoholic who could not sustain much of a career.” Hensher sees Desmond as the interruption, saying Fitzgerad’s “professional experience was seamless and well-considered before she met Desmond; it starts to move again very efficiently in the very last years of his life.” True enough. But we have seen there was space for Fitzgerald to be creative. And to blame Desmond is to take a straightforward view of complicated things. Many lives were affected by the war. As Penelope said, in a very different context, “nothing is ever all anybody’s fault.” It would also be misleading to say that Desmond was entirely a burden to Penelope. After he died, she wrote to a friend, “the truth is I was spoilt, as with all our ups and downs Desmond always thought everything I did was right.” She wrote later to the same friend: “I really don’t see how one can do without a family.” Talking to the Guardian in 1998 she said, “The sort of men I like are life’s losers. They struggle gallantly, but they really ought to be left in peace.” If she did make a choice between her family and her art, however conscious, however much choice she really had, she didn’t entirely regret it. These were partly years of impediment, partly, as her son-in-law says, “The years when, as Cervantes said to explain his own long silence, she was living her life.”

Certainly her life was exhausting. In the 1960s and 1970s her letters are full of references to her tiredness. On one occasion, she fell asleep in the British Library and was woken up by the man sitting next to her. In 1977, the year Desmond died, she wrote to a friend, “I think we middle-class ladies are really driving ourselves mad by doing all the things that were formally done by a ‘staff’ and keeping up our cultural interests as well — tho’ there you are, we can’t help it. But when I lived in the council flat I noticed the other ladies seemed to have time to stand on their doorsteps and talk to each other all day, and I thought they managed better than I did.” There is a clear image of a woman struggling under the many demands of her life here; but also of a woman with time, space, and energy for “cultural interests”. These were wide ranging and significant to her later writing. 

Being hassled was never an impediment when she was a novelist; quite the opposite. She wrote in the staff room between lessons, scribbling on the back of envelopes. (She wrote to her editor in 1980, “I have found various small bits on the backs of envelopes that should have gone in, but perhaps it’s too late to do this.”) Working at the BBC might have precluded this sort of writing, but it is an instructive parallel. She seemed to thrive in busy environments. When she moved to Somerset with her daughter and son-in-law in 1982, she said in a letter: “I personally can only write in London, I love the noise and squalor and the perpetual distractions.” 

It would be absurd to compare this with the strains of Desmond’s war trauma, drinking, and uncertain income. But we also cannot see her as simply prevented from writing by the business of her life as a wife and mother. In the last year of her life she wrote that most women will always be “kitchen-table writers”. Unable to write any other way, “a woman, in my experience, can pick up her draft novel and go on with it, precisely until the telephone, the doorbell, the egg timer, or the alarm rings.” She compared this to the way Napoleon could nap for ten minutes exactly. This wasn’t something she was happy about — she was by no means romanticising the realities of women’s lives. But she said that once she left teaching she missed the staff room “full of undercurrents of exhaustion, worry, and reproach”. Those are the undercurrents of her fiction, too. For a long time after she retired, sitting in silence meant, “I could scarcely get anything written.” 

---

A snapshot that feels like an eternity.

All of this has to be put in the context that Fitzgerald didn’t only want to be a literary writer. Despite the fact that she would look back nostalgically to the poetry rhyme sheets she’d had on her bedroom wall as a child, and the fact that she was a hugely literary person, her son-in-law wrote, “She is on record as saying in an ideal life she wouldn’t have gone to Oxford to read English, but would have become an artist. Much of her writing in World Review (and her first book Burne-Jones) was on art.” There were discussions with a publisher as late as the 1970s about Penelope writing a book on flower symbolism in Renaissance art. 

Claims that she was held back from writing aspirations need to be seen not only in the context of her early life and creative pursuits, but also her early interests, which were not always literary. Through various means and impediments — her marriage, her lifelong self-education, the development of her moral perspective, her teaching — she arrived at literature; she wasn’t entirely diverted from it. As late as 1981, when she had written four novels, she wrote to her editor Richard Ollard that she had been asked to look at William Morris’ novel and “a mysterious chestful of Pre-Raphaelite papers” as well as having her (ultimately never published) work on the Poetry Bookshop to keep her busy. “Perhaps I’m better employed doing this… than in writing novels,” she muses. A response, no doubt, to the slow sales of Human Voices that year (she was never a very fashionable novelist in the time of Martin Amis) and a coy way of sounding out his support for her work, but telling nonetheless. She had won the Booker Prize at this point. (Stuart Proffit points out that Penelope was the last person to win the Booker before it was televised. “It didn’t have the transformative effect it does now. It was hard for her when it was difficult to sell the books.” She knew the value of her work and she had to keep waiting for success after this.)

Her absorbing interest in the Arts and Crafts movement, part of her broader Victorian sympathy and her preference for the Georgian poets over the Bloomsbury writers (despite her admiration for modernism, especially the novels of Beckett and Joyce), did not just inform her biography of Burne-Jones; it recurs in The Beginning of Spring. That novel was informed by a package holiday she took to Moscow in 1975, after years of studying Russian, involving many events — “lectures, films, theatres, exhibitions” — with the Great Britain-USSR Association. Similarly, in 1979, when Desmond was ill and she felt resentful of him, believing no-one cared about the publication of Burne-Jones, she went to Florence on her own, a visit that would re-emerge nearly a decade later in her novel Innocence. She also studied Spanish, German, and Chinese, visited Venice, Germany, Elba, Turkey, Madrid, Greece, and other countries. Her letters mention studying Spanish grammar at night. She was studying Russian at a similar period. So esoteric was the influence of this cultural immersion that when she based Human Voices on a poem by Heine (indicated by the name Asra and the reference in the novel to Asra being the name of a tribe) no critic noticed it, as she predicted. She asked the novelist A.S. Byatt, her old teaching colleague, to write something pointing this out. “I hadn’t noticed that and I don’t know how she expected anyone to do so,” Byatt recalled. 

Penelope’s daughter studied Balzac at A-level and Penelope studied with her, Scènes de le Vie de Provence. As her son-in-law says, “the moral atmosphere” of The Bookshop “perhaps also some of the form (each chapter a scene)” is influenced by Balzac. For The Blue Flower as well as reading the letters of Novalis in the original eighteenth century German, she read the “records of the salt mines from cover to cover in German to understand how her hero was employed.” She had Novalis’ letters and private documents out of the London Library for two years. “My German”, she said, “really wasn’t up to it though.” That’s a sign of her modesty, but also her respect for scholarship and the seriousness with which she approached her novels. It is that depth of learning that gives the last four novels what Wendy Lesser calls “a sense of Germanness, Russianness.” Lesser compares Fitzgerald to Vermeer, who shows us a snapshot that “feels like an eternity”. It was only with deep learning that she could know what snapshot to show. Lesser also shows that details of language, like the use of the definite article before a name in Germany, have a specific usage at the time period Fitzgerald was writing about, highlighting the immense subtlety of how Fitzgerald achieves her effects. She simply could not have written like this when she was young. She is a novelist of great learning, in all senses, from books, classes, travel, culture, and living.

Her teaching experience was another vital part of her development. She was a precise and attentive reader of literature, and her work at the two colleges where she taught aspiring Oxbridge students meant she had to re-read the canon of English Literature with an inquiring eye and life-wearied imagination. As one of her pupils recalled, “she taught literature like a novelist, always the text back to the stuff of experience and getting us to look at how it was being done.” This constituted an apprenticeship for Fitzgerald, who made detailed annotations in her teaching books. There is tentative evidence that she was not undertaking her intensive self-education out of sheer curiosity. One of her notes on an exam paper with the question ‘Should there be limits to curiosity?” reads, “Scarcely an adult quality in itself — what is it an element of? Ambitious search for truth etc in biography.” In her restless pursuit of the truth about literature and history, she was laying the foundations for her fiction. The dialogue between Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot is marked as being between mind and body, which Lee links to the later fiction, especially The Gate of Angels. Of Middlemarch, Fitzgerald says, “low-keyed emotions but minutely traced” and “the characters’ prospects narrow as the novel closes.” (Penelope used that last note in her  Introduction to Middlemarch, some twenty years later.) Both of these could be comments on Fitzgerald’s own technique. She often shows sympathy or keenness for minor characters, ordinary people, the overlooked — the ones she would write about. She started off with little enthusiasm for George Eliot and ended by admiring her hugely. 

Fitzgerald’s novels could only have been written later in her life, partly because of the huge amount of research and learning they required, but also because they are evocations of a lost England, the Edwardian culture of her childhood. When she was a young woman this England was still slipping away; by the time she started writing, it was gone. Writing to a friend in 1998, when she was in her eighties, she said, “I suppose it’s ridiculous to regret the Liberal Party, the Church of England, Lyons tea shops, Carter Paterson, telegrams and so on, but so many of them seemed to disappear at once.” 

One of her first books was The Knox Brothers, a group biography of her uncles, a group of intellectual Victorians who edited Punch, wrote detective fiction, and cracked codes at Bletchley Park. This book was a very conscious and obvious study of the lost world of the Liberal Party and the Church of England, as well as of Punch (“an important paper in its day, has been reduced to nothing.”) Years after she published it, she said to her editor, “Even while I was writing it I thought what a closed chapter of history it was, but I didn’t mind, because I wanted to leave a record of it before it was too late.” By the end of the year, when The Knox Brothers was being reissued, she wrote, “it seems to belong more and more to vanished era.” This was not a world she was always interested in preserving. As a young woman, “I tried to get away from them and do my own thing. I didn’t realise until much later, indeed until after my father’s death, how much there was to find out about them, and by that time it was almost too late.” When she came back into sympathy with her uncles, she did so in a fairly serious way: “in so far as the world disagrees with them, I disagree with the world.” Far from being inhibited from pursuing this work earlier in her life, she had to go away and come back before she was able to contemplate it properly: “I count a violent reaction against an upbringing,” she said of her uncles, but could have been talking about herself, “a kind of faithfulness.”  It was not until the world she had known was fading that she could write about it, or wanted to. 

She regularly evokes this lost world in her fiction. Characters in Human Voices, set in the BBC during 1940, discuss going to Lyons tea rooms. In one scene, after a night of bombing, Lyons is serving potatoes through one hole in their windows and taking in money through another. When Annia Asra in that novel falls in love with her boss Sam, Fitzgerald writes, “hers must have been the last generation to fall in love without hope in such an unproductive way.” Sam ends up quitting his job to be with Annie. This isn’t nostalgia exactly, but a form of preservation. As Sam says, “nothing is an experience unless it’s shared.”

The Bookshop is also a bastion of a vanishing world. In 1997, she wrote to her American editor, “It seems like another world… Mrs Neame (name of the original proprietor, now dead, alas, would have been horrified at the idea of online book-selling).” During a dispute about who is allowed to read the new biography of Queen Mary first, there is gossip that Mrs Thornton “was known to have voted Liberal in the last election.” That book is set in the 1950s, a hopeless time for the Liberal Party. The indifferent workings of the bookshop, operating on commercial principles, clashes with the traditional hierarchy of the town’s class system. Fitzgerald was capturing the decline of the culture she had known, not its peak. 

It is tempting to see Fitzgerald herself in these two early novels. Annie Asra says of music, “less is more, sometimes.” This was Fitzgerald’s view of fiction. The year she was writing Human Voices she said in a letter, “I deeply believe that ‘less is more’. I like Daisy Miller better than Wings of a Dove and even Master and Man better than War and Peace.” Like Penelope, Annie finds the BBC controlling. Annie falls in love with Sam, a hopeless middle-aged man, not a parallel with Penelope who married Desmond in 1942 when he was a dashing young Guards officer. But she is the first in a series of women characters who fall in love with men with significant failings. Fitzgerald writes these men to be understood, not judged. “You’ve no idea about others, and you don’t notice what makes them suffer,” Annie tells Sam, in a line that wouldn’t be out of place in Offshore, a novel much more closely modelled on the Fitzgerald’s marriage. Annie and Sam leave the BBC together and meet a utopian crank called Willie, who tells them, “a good society transforms its members.” There’s a good deal of Penelope’s Church of England Liberalism in that sentiment. Like Penelope, Annie is a young woman of the arts, somewhat adrift in wartime London, who finds an unlikely husband; as with so many of her characters, we feel slightly weary of their happiness at the end, not least because of the omen of Sam’s colleague Jeff leaving the BBC building to go and meet them only to be killed when he mistakes a taxi for an unexploded bomb. 

Similarly, Penelope haunts The Bookshop, rather like the poltergeist that lurks in that novel. In the opening, when deciding what to do with an inheritance from her husband, Florence “had recently come to wonder whether she hadn’t a duty to make it clear to herself, and possibly to others, that she existed in her own right.” This isn’t literally Penelope — but she too was a recent widow and had reason to understand and write about such people. Here again she evokes a lost England, and something of a lost self: Müllers, a bookshop on Wigmore Street, closes after many years, which Florence takes “as a personal attack on her memories.” Penelope, too, had worked in a bookshop. And Florence has changed her life mid-way on the wave, just as Penelope was doing. “It is a peculiar thing to take a step forward in middle age, but having done it I don’t intend to retreat.” Indeed, the whole novel is about being a late bloomer, about “that precious sense of beginning again which she could not expect too often at her age.”

They would have been different, less accomplished novels, if she had written them young. Both have aphorisms wrought from experience. In The Bookshop we are told, “Courage and wisdom are useless if they are never tested.” And, “The uselessness of feeling ashamed.” In Human Voices Annie’s father’s friends say, “We’re never sent more than we can bear.” And, “You begin life helpless and you end life helpless.” It took a novelist who had lived through what Fitzgerald had lived through to write these books. Even when her books weren’t based on her own life, they were recreating this lost time, whether in England or other places. “All my books are before the 1960s as this was the last time anyone was stopped from doing anything for moral considerations.”

There is more to this than aphorisms. The whole philosophy of Fitzgerald’s writing, as well as her plots, comes out of her experiences. It tells in the minor characters, the asides. Mrs Simmonds is “generous enough to learn nothing from experience.” Sam says of Annie, “She isn’t carried out of herself… by the sheer injustice of life’s coincidence.” This philosophy of having to ignore the reality of life if you are to get through it is described directly in The Bookshop:

She blinded herself, in short, by pretending for a while that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given moment, predominating. Will-power is useless without a sense of direction. Hers was at such a low ebb that it no longer gave her the instructions for survival. It revived, however, without any effort on her part, and within the space of ten minutes on a Tuesday morning at the end of March.

How much is contained in this paragraph. The distinction between “exterminators and exterminatees” is often quoted by critics; the rest of the paragraph is just as important. “Will-power is useless without a sense of direction” might easily describe Penelope’s dilemma about writing earlier in her life: what did she have to write about, what was her purpose in writing? As she aged, and needed the money, and wanted to have something to fill her time, and was free of some of her domestic responsibility, writing began. She wrote to Hugh Lee the year she wrote The Bookshop, “I’m not quite sure why I have taken to writing either, but it’s better than weaving, hand-printing &c in that it represents a slight profit rather than a large loss for the amateur; also it struck me that I was getting to the end of my life and would like to write one or 2 biographies of people I loved and novels about people I didn’t like, put it that way.”

Penelope started researching her first biography in her early fifties. Just as her first novel would be written when her husband was dying, this book was written after her father died. Psychological speculation would be easy but useless, possibly misleading. Maybe she wanted to finally live up to her family’s expectations; maybe she needed to be free of them; maybe she had demons to exorcise; maybe she finally had the emotional space away from everyone’s expectations; maybe, maybe, maybe. This is all very vague and not very Penelope. All sorts of triggers motivate people to change their lives for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, the simple fact of change inspires further change. 

The most likely effect of her father’s death was that she realised just how much of the old world that she had come to affectionately admire was slipping away. She wrote to her daughter about her father on his deathbed:

He complained gently as people do when they’re dying that the room was getting dark. We said that the lights were on. My father said “of course they are. How absurd one is. [Very Edwardian. We’ve lost the secret.] But there’s an awkward thing about dying – one gets so little practice.” I treasure that “how absurd one is” and hope I won’t forget it when the time comes.

That is the culture she captures so well in her books, those snapshots of eternity.

---

Drawn to the solitary, gazing lamp.

The idea that Fitzgerald was prevented from writing earlier than she did gets expressed in many ways. It is a pervasive and persuasive idea. In her preface to the novels, Hermione Lee quotes Fitzgerald saying, after she won the Booker Prize, “I knew I was an outsider.” This gives the impression of someone who has finally made it, someone with a long-held sense of their potential, someone held back by the world. That’s probably true of Fitzgerald. And as Lee points out, many of her characters are outsiders. But what Fitzgerald actually said, in a letter to her friend Francis King, was “I know I was an outsider.” It’s a small difference, the shift from knew to know, but it changes the meaning quite significantly. In the letter where she says this, Fitzgerald wasn’t talking about anything long-term, any sense of herself she had nurtured over the years. She was acknowledging that she was a surprise choice for the prize and that she won because the judges were split. Her intuition was correct. Frank Kermode had written before the prize that Fitzgerald was “on the list to be eliminated”. Hilary Spurling, one of the judges, later wrote about how Fitzgerald was “everyone’s second choice” and won because of a judges’ dispute. “I know I was an outsider,” she said, meaning she knew how the prize committee worked. It was no sort of bigger commentary on her career.

The idea of Fitzgerald as a perpetual outsider is compelling. But she didn’t start as an outsider. Quite the contrary. Her father edited Punch. Her uncles and aunt were renowned cryptographers, writers, and priests. Both grandfathers were bishops (Manchester and Lincoln). Indeed, she was born in a Bishop’s Palace. After her girls boarding school, she went to the same Oxford college as her mother. There was something suffocating about this brilliant childhood, perhaps especially because her mother died when she was a teenager. It is easy to see the influence of Desmond on her later life, but it is sensible to ask, as James Wood did, whether “some Knoxian combination of insecurity and confidence held her back until she could be sure of avoiding public failure?” If so, it makes sense that she would dwell on the fact that she won the Booker Prize as an outsider, because in her words the judges “ruled out novels evidently written with one eye on film rights.” 

This insecurity is evident after she was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1978. She asked her publisher Colin Haycraft if he was interested in taking more of her novels after The Bookshop and he seems to have said no, and in a rather dismissive manner. She wrote to him, entirely in good faith, saying she was taking his advice to get another publisher. She thanked him for giving her a start by publishing her novels, “I’m sure you were right in saying no-one else would have taken them.” Haycraft was upset by this, thinking her cunning and careerist. In fact she was taking advice from Francis King, who was appalled at her poor treatment from Haycraft. Haycraft wrote to her denying he had told her to go elsewhere or that he had said he disliked her work. He was upset at her sudden departure. Haycraft was mean and gossipy, but Fitzgerald lacked confidence and was apt, as she wrote to him, to take remarks too seriously. As Hensher says, “it was definitely a strange moment for the novelist to be convinced of her lack of success in the world.” 

It would be easy to read more steel into Fitzgerald than she displayed here. She was firmly rejecting Haycraft’s muddled and overbearing treatment, refusing to be treated like a little old lady — but she was also bad at business, perhaps the result of her combination of firm independence and mild insecurity. She was an unworldly artist, uncomfortable with practicalities and necessities. One of her students remembered the way she talked about authors’ lives, especially the poet Yeats coming downstairs from his tower and saying, about his own children, “who are they?” She wasn’t quite that bad; but she was that sort of person. She was hugely earnest and absorbed in what mattered to her. Stuart Proffit remembered that she didn’t make small talk in any conventional way. “She wanted to know what you were doing and reading and she talked about her grandchildren in little asides.” He noted that she wasn't someone you could get to know easily—”she wasn’t a quick study”—but the people who did work with her became hugely devoted to her. She had an artist’s interest in, and detachment from, the world. 

First, Fitzgerald wrote biographies, reliant on research. Then she moved into novels. “Biographies and novels are the forms I can just about manage.” She told an interviewer that biography was easier than fiction, because of the research, whereas with fiction “you’re out on your own.” She moved to fiction because biography was hard, competitive work and she preferred being able to write dialogue. And in those early novels, she wrote from life. In Human Voices, “I never went away from the truth.” In At Freddies “all the characters are taken straight from life.” The facts were transmogrified sometimes — she had to help two people having epiletic fits when she worked at the BBC; in the novel, this became a woman giving birth. But often, the novels hew closely to reality. The poltergeist in The Bookshop was entirely real to her experience. So she was not quite out on her own: she was always a historical novelist, building and working from the materials of history, first her own, later other people’s. 

This technique was slowly refined. As A.S. Byatt said, “Her genius became apparent when she began to write fiction about the facts of other times and places.” Even in those last four novels, we see personal experience seeping through. Innocence has a character described as a dwarf. During a holiday to Elba, some twenty years before she wrote Innocence, Penelope took her first trip to Florence. In a letter about that holiday she described a member of the hotel staff as “a dwarf, only 3 ft high.” The Gate of Angels is about a young man in Cambridge at the start of the twentieth century who meets his future wife when he has a bicycling accident. This was surely inspired by a puncture her uncle Ronald Knox once had at Cambridge in 1908, which he had to repair at a country Vicarage. No addresses were exchanged with the vicar’s daughters. Despite this, and despite the fact they were not “extremely beautiful” and that once one of them was engaged, “who shall say it was not a romance,” wrote the young Ronald, “because the threads were broken?” The threads were broken in The Gate of Angels too — but inspired by the way fiction can go beyond history, how it can let you see a life again in different terms, Penelope weaved those threads back together, albeit with an ambivalent sense of the future. 

In “Why I Write” Fitzgerald gave three reasons for writing fiction. She felt compelled to tell stories, like all writers. “I get great satisfaction out of making people believe that this even happened at that time.” She wanted to make money. And, perhaps most importantly, 

I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost. They are ready to assume the conditions the world imposes on them, but they don’t manage to submit to them, despite their courage and their best efforts. They are not envious, simply compassless. When I write it is to give these people a voice.

As much as she was a historical novelist, working from her carefully cultivated knowledge of European history and culture, she was repeatedly re-writing her and her family’s lives. She had to live the life she lived before she could become the writer she became. Not everyone in her position, whether they are writers, mathematicians, musicians, or talented people who never found their direction, are so lucky. Fitzgerald had to be defeated and profoundly lost in her life before she could write; she had to experience the reality of her subjects to be able to make them vivid in historical fiction. 

All those years when she, presumably, was hoping for relief from the difficulties of her life, she was in fact storing up material for her novels. It was by reimagining her whole life “All prayers are answers,” Fitzgerald wrote in the manuscript of The Gate of Angels, a line she later deleted, “You just have to make the best you can of the answer.”

When her father Evoe died, and Penelope became painfully aware of the loss of Edwardian England, one very specific trigger for her start as a writer came from a newspaper article she read in November 1974 about the academic and ghost story writer M.R. James, written by the biographer Richard Holmes. Penelope told Holmes twenty-three years later that she started to write “as a result of reading your piece about Monty James in the Times, so many years ago. I’ve still got it, although it’s almost falling to pieces.”

The article is a long biographical appreciation of James, written in an evocative tone that summons up warmly the whole world of Edwardian Cambridge that Penelope grew up in and would write about in The Knox Brothers and then again in The Gate of Angels. Holmes ends his piece by quoting a passage from one of M.R. James’ stories and then saying that psychologists, sociologists, and historians will have their own ‘comforting dictums’ and will want to ‘study’ and ‘trace’ various trends and evolutions in response to James’ work. Not so the literary Holmes.

For myself, I shall call to mind only the view from the College Library, as the dark finally settles into the courts, and very faintly the sounds of evensong drifts on the chill airs in the sweet harmonious voices of the King’s choristers, and here and there a scholar twitches his curtains, seals his door, and draws up his chair to the pool of light beneath his solitary, gazing lamp.

Penelope was settled into the second half of her life when she read that, with a dead father and grown-up children. She didn’t seal her door or twitch her curtains, but she was increasingly drawn to the gazing lamp, ready to dissaccumulate her experiences and to start gathering more purposefully the research for biographies and novels so that she too could write like Richard Holmes. Whatever the reason, this article, with its gorgeous, accurate prose, was part of what started her actually writing. Her books would start being published the following year. M.R. James himself would appear in The Gate of Angels, some sixteen years later. Holmes’ inspiration ran deep with Penelope, but it came at the right time.

The way she kept studying literature throughout her life, and the way her moral perspective changed, were the basis of writing literature for Penelope. As she said, “The truth is, though I would never dare saying it in public, that the value of studying literature only really appears as you go on living.”