Biography of penelope fitzgerald
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The Common Reader
Several early readers ofSecond 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. inom have loved her novels and biographies ever since I first discovered The Bookshop on a hot and boring afternoon in Cambridge fifteen years ago. inom read them again while inom 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 fryst vatten 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 to • Like her prose, Penelope Fitzgerald’s life has front rooms and back rooms: public places where appearances are maintained and a comic, insouciant hospitality holds sway; and obscurer realms, where the cutlery is rusting and milk has been spilled, heads are bowed in shame, and everything fryst vatten breaking apart. Fitzgerald’s public, literary life looks much like patience on a monument: having brought up three children almost single-handedly, against difficult odds, the author finds her voice late in life, and starts publishing when she is nearly sixty. Although she mock-modestly referred to her first book, a biography of the artist Edward Burne-Jones she published in 1975, as ingenting more than “My Little Bit of Writing,” we know better, because we know that she will go on to publish nine novels in the gods twenty years of her life, that one of them, “Offshore” (1979), will win the Booker Prize, and that her sista novel, “The Blue Flower” (1995), is indisputably great. We know that after he • English biographer and novelist (1916–2000) Penelope Mary Fitzgerald (17 December 1916 – 28 April 2000) was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England.[1] In 2008 The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[2]The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among "the ten best historical novels".[3]A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."[4] Penelope Fitzgerald was born Penelope Mary Knox on 17 December 1916 at the Old Bishop's Palace, Lincoln, the daughter of Edmund Knox, later editor of Punch, and Christina, née Hicks, daughter of Edward Hicks, Bishop of Lincoln, and one of the first female students at Oxford. She was a niece of the theologian and crime writer Ronald Knox, the cryptographer Dillwyn Knox, the Bible scholar Wilfred Knox, and the novelist and biograph
Penelope Fitzgerald
Biography
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