Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life

Frankly, I had never heard of Penelope Fitzgerald before reading this biography. Since then I have read one of her novels, The Blue Flower. But mostly I went into this completely blind. But it was on the New York Times Ten Best list for 2014, I love biographies of writers, and it was written by Hermione Lee, who wrote a terrific biography of Virginia Woolf.

Perhaps the most notable thing about her is that she wrote her first book at sixty, and became famous at eighty. That's certainly encouraging to hear for us over-fifties that have yet to be published. But Lee finds that Fitzgerald came from an interesting family and led an interesting, if at times harrowing, early life.

She was the granddaughter of two bishops, and grew up in an eccentric family. She later wrote a book about her mother's brothers, which she wrote about: "She describes them in The Knox Brothers as a brilliantly clever English family distinguished by alarming honesty, caustic wit, shyness, moral rigor, willpower, oddness and powerful banked-down feelings, erupting in moments of sentiment ot in violent bursts of temper and gloom.

Her father was an editor at Punch, the legendary British humor magazine. She attended Oxford--the women's college of Somerville--and worked for the BBC. She then married a war hero, Desmond Fitzgerald, and had three children. It wasn't entirely drudgery for her, though, she and Desmond had a go at a very ambitious literary magazine, she worked at a bookstore, and then was a teacher.

Lee writes about her early life by tying them to autobiographical novels. The BBC years were turned into Human Voices, the bookstore into The Bookshop, and a time living in a barge on the Thames turned into Offshore. But she did not write a book until she penned a biography of pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. Her first novel was a light thriller, The Golden Child, after which she was encouraged to write mysteries.

But she became a different kind of writer, a literary novelist who achieved some fame in the U.K. Her novel Offshore was a surprise winner of the Booker Prize, and she became a member of the literary set, judging competitions, writing reviews, and turning out short but well-crafted novels.

One of the problems of reading a biography of a writer you haven't read is you have to only believe the biographer's belief in her talent. Lee summarizes the novels, which can be difficult sledding. But, as a writer myself, supposedly, I was intrigued by the descriptions of her style and creative process. Fitzgerald wrote, "I am drawn...to people who seem to have born defeated or, even, profoundly lost."

Her later books were not autobiographical. She wrote about a secretive college in The Gates of Angels, Russia in The Beginning of Spring, and her last novel, The Blue Flower, was about the German romantic poet Novalis. That book, released when she was 80, made her a star of sorts.

Lee's book is certainly not a hagiography. She writes about the difficulties of the Fitzgerald marriage: "She knew...that Desmond was a failure. He was kind and devoted to her and the children. But he was not earning enough for the housekeeping; his professional life was going nowhere; he was spending money on drink."

Fitzgerald was devoted to her children and grandchildren, but never seemed to approve of her son's choice of wife. She also seemed to be something of a downer in her philosophy about life: "'Really the book is about what a great mistake it is to try and make other people happy.' The blurb notes: 'Trying to make other people happy is not only difficult but ruinous.'"

I would disagree with that, but I'm intrigued enough that I will try another of her books. I wasn't crazy about The Blue Flower; perhaps one of her earlier books will charm me. It's a great biography, though.