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Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. She was the author of nine novels, three of which – The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels – were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She won the prize in 1979 for Offshore. Her last novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the 'Book of the Year'. It won America's National Book Critics' Circle Award, and this helped introduce her to a wider international readership.
A superb biographer and critic, Penelope Fitzgerald was also the author of lives of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (her first book), the poet Charlotte Mew and The Knox Brothers – a study of her remarkable father Edmund Knox, editor of Punch, and his equally remarkable brothers.
Penelope Fitzgerald did not embark on her literary career until the age of sixty. After graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, she worked at the BBC during the war, edited a literary journal, ran a bookshop and taught at various schools, including a theatrical school; her early novels drew upon many of these experiences.
She died in April 2000, at the age of eighty-three.
Click here to read Penelope Fitzgerald's son-in-law discuss her legacy to coincide with the 100th anniversary of her birth.
Fellow novelist Katharine McMahon on Penelope Fitzgerald...
I was introduced to this author just as I began to be published, and I love her wit, and her quirky approach to plot. The Beginning of Spring is a delicious novel, and it's as if the entire book is pitched towards the very last few lines. This reads like a small, perfectly formed, Russian novel, but amazingly is written by a very English author.
Winner of the Booker Prize 1979. Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prize-winning novel of loneliness and connecting is set among the houseboat community of the Thames and has a new Introduction from Alan Hollinghurst. Click here to read Penelope Fitzgerald's son-in-law discuss her legacy to coincide with the 100th anniversary of her birth.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Hardborough becomes a battleground. Florence has tried to change the way things have always been done, and as a result, she has to take on not only the people who have made themselves important, but natural and even supernatural forces too. Her fate will strike a chord with anyone who knows that life has treated them with less than justice. Click here to read Penelope Fitzgerald's son-in-law discuss her legacy to coincide with the 100th anniversary of her birth.
One of the most admired of all Penelope Fitzgerald's books, The Blue Flower was chosen as Book of the Year more than any other in 1995. Her final book, it confirmed her reputation as one of the finest novelists of the century. A masterpiece. One of Joanna Trollope's favourite books. I had supper with her once, in the converted garage of her daughter’s house, where she was then living, and she was as warm and restrained and acute and beguiling as her books, of which my absolute favourite is The Blue Flower, the story of an extraordinary betrothal in eighteenth century Germany. If anyone needs a pattern of How To Write, Penelope Fitzgerald is IT. Click here to read Penelope Fitzgerald's son-in-law discuss her legacy to coincide with the 100th anniversary of her birth.
One of Katharine McMahon's favourite books. Highly evocative of time and place this wonderful novel set in the early 20th century is funny, touching and curious. A real treasure of a novel. A "Piece of Passion" from the publisher... Perhaps Penelope Fitzgerald’s finest novel, The Beginning of Spring is the story of Frank Reid, an ex-pat Englishman struggling to run his printing firm and keep his family together in turn-of-the-century Moscow. Written in Fitzgerald’s beautifully light, careful and evocative style and packed with her perfectly observed portraits of human nature (particularly of Frank’s young, but precociously intelligent, children), it is a wonderfully touching novel, about the confusions that life can throw at any of us. April 2010 Guest Editor Katharine McMahon on Penelope Fitzgerald... I was introduced to this author just as I began to be published, and I love her wit, and her quirky approach to plot. The Beginning of Spring is a delicious novel, and it's as if the entire book is pitched towards the very last few lines. This reads like a small, perfectly formed, Russian novel, but amazingly is written by a very English author.
Penelope Fitzgerald's final masterpiece. One of the ten books - novels, memoirs and one very unusual biography - that make up our Matchbook Classics' series, a stunningly redesigned collection of some of the best loved titles on our backlist. The year is 1794 and Fritz, passionate, idealistic and brilliant, is seeking his father's permission to announce his engagement to his 'heart's heart', his 'true Philosophy': twelve-year-old Sophie. His astounded family and friends are amused and disturbed by his betrothal. What can he be thinking? Tracing the dramatic early years of the young German who was to become the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis, The Blue Flower is a masterpiece of invention, evoking the past with a reality that we can almost feel. Her final book, it confirmed Fitzgerald's reputation as one of the finest novelists of the 20th century.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In a small East Anglian town, Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop. Hardborough becomes a battleground. Florence has tried to change the way things have always been done, and as a result, she has to take on not only the people who have made themselves important, but natural and even supernatural forces too. Her fate will strike a chord with anyone who knows that life has treated them with less than justice.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize.In a small East Anglian town, Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop.Hardborough becomes a battleground. Florence has tried to change the way things have always been done, and as a result, she has to take on not only the people who have made themselves important, but natural and even supernatural forces too. Her fate will strike a chord with anyone who knows that life has treated them with less than justice.
Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prize-winning novel of loneliness and connecting is set among the houseboat community of the Thames and has a new introduction from Alan Hollinghurst. On Battersea Reach, a mixed bag of the temporarily lost and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the tide of the Thames. There is good-natured Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by chance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, an ex-navy man whose boat, much like its owner, dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, an abandoned wife and mother of two young girls running wild on the muddy foreshore, whose domestic predicament, as it deepens, will draw this disparate community together.
From the Booker Prize-winning author of 'Offshore' comes this unusual romance between the poet Novalis and his fiancee Sophie, newly introduced by Candia McWilliam. The year is 1794 and Fritz, passionate, idealistic and brilliant, is seeking his father's permission to announce his engagement to his heart's desire: twelve-year-old Sophie. His astounded family and friends are amused and disturbed by his betrothal. What can he be thinking?Tracing the dramatic early years of the young German who was to become the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis, 'The Blue Flower' is a masterpiece of invention, evoking the past with a reality that we can almost feel.
The Blue Flower is set in the age of Goethe, in the small towns and great universities of late eighteenth-century Germany. It tells the true story of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a passionate, impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the romantic poet Novalis. Fritz seeks his father's permission to wed his "e;heart's heart,"e; his "e;spirit's guide"e;-a plain, simple child named Sophie von Kuhn. It is an attachment that shocks his family and friends. Their brilliant young Fritz, betrothed to a twelve-year-old dullard? How can this be?The 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.
Penelope Fitzgerald, the Booker Prize-winning author of `Offshore' and `The Blue Flower', turns her attention to the remarkable life of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. `I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone - in a land no one can define or remember, only desire' Edward Burne-Jones Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) was the prototypical pre-Raphaelite but with a truly individual sensibility. Penelope Fitzgerald's delightful biography charts his life from humble beginnings in Birmingham as the son of an unsuccessful framer, through a transformative period at Oxford, where he met his close friend and collaborator William Morris, and on to the apprenticeship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti that would shape his artistic vision. His work harks back to an Arthurian England - an Arcadia that offered solace against the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and on a deeply personal level provided respite from his ever-present melancholia. This is an illuminating portrait of a fascinating figure - artistic genius, doting father, troubled husband - written with all Penelope Fitzgerald's characteristic sympathy and insight.
It is 1912, and at Cambridge University the modern age is knocking at the gate. In lecture halls and laboratories, the model of a universe governed by the mind of God is at last giving way to something wholly rational, a universe governed by the laws of physics. To junior fellow Fred Fairly, this comes as a great comfort. Science, he is certain, will soon explain everything. Mystery will be routed by reason, and the demands of the soul will be seen for what they are, a distraction and an illusion. Into Fred's orderly life comes Daisy, with a bang-literally. One moment the two are perfect strangers; the next, they are casualties of a freakish accident, occupants of the same warm bed. Fred has never been so close to a woman before, one so pretty, so plainspoken, and yet so mysterious. Is she a manifestation of chaos, or a sign of another kind of order?
A fascinating collection of letters from the great English novelist - and prolific correspondent - Penelope Fitzgerald. Acclaimed for her exquisitely elegant novels - including the Booker Prize-winning 'Offshore' - and superb biographies, Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the finest British authors of the last century. Published here for the first time are her collected letters. An unparalleled record of the life of this greatly admired writer, these letters reveal her most important family relationships and friendships, and paint a clear picture both of herself and of her correspondents. They show us how she managed her own career - according to her own convictions - and how determined she was to put her world view across. A fascinating portrait of Penelope Fitzgerald as a mother, as a friend and as a writer, these letters give the same pleasure they gave to those who first opened them. Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most distinctive voices in British literature. The prize-winning author of nine novels, three biographies and one collection of short stories, she died in 2000.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEE The previously uncollected occasional prose of a great English writer - full of wit, feeling and illumination. Penelope Fitzgerald was a prolific letter writer. She avoided the phone if she could, never even contemplated the possibility of going online. Her warmth, humour and supreme storytelling abilities found their best forum here. Surprising, wonderfully funny, definitive, this is a major collection of Penelope Fitzgerald's reviews, essays and autobiographical writings. This collection includes pieces on contemporary novelists Giles Foden, Anne Enright, Carol Shields, Rose Tremain, Roddy Doyle; on classic writers Muriel Spark, A.E. Housman, Rose Macaulay, M.R. James, Stevie Smith, Dorothy L. Sayers; on remembering her grandfather E.H. Shepard; on her love of Devon and Spain and William Morris: on writers in their old age; and witty and poignant recollections of her schooldays, her life on a Thames barge, her childhood in Hampstead and the ghost who lived next door but one. This is a fantastically funny book - as much of an entertainment as the Kingsley Amis letters.
Edward Burne-Jones is well known as a Pre-Raphelite painter, but little is known about his life. Here, in her first book, Penelope Fitzgerald paints a portrait of one of the most interesting and individual of all Victorian artists.
Sixty-one when she published her first novel, Penelope Fitzgerald based many subsequent books on the experiences of a long and varied life. Offshore, which won the Booker Prize in 1979, explores her time living on a barge at Battersea Reach. Human Voices takes place in the BBC where she worked during World War II. Both are vivid, intimate pictures of ordinary life, startling, sad and funny by turns, conjuring up complex worlds with the economy of poetry. The Beginning of Spring is an historical novel operating on a larger canvas. It presents a life unknown to the author through a story of English emigres in pre-Revolutionary Russia and has been described by one critic as the best 'Russian' novel of the twentieth century. Written with energy, passion and wit, and each quite different from the others, all three of these masterpieces reveal a lightness of touch with the most serious matters unlike anything else in contemporary fiction.
Penelope Fitzgerald's fascinating portrait of the tragic poet and her life at the heart of the Bloomsbury set. Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) cut one of the most distinctive figures of the twentieth century - beloved of Siegfried Sassoon and Walter de la Mare (for whom she was 'a very rare being'), unafraid of Virginia Woolf, and considered by Hardy to be 'far and away the best living woman poet'. Part of a new wave of fashionable female dandies who lived passionate, precarious existences in Bloomsbury, she was an enchanting and spirited personality. But behind the brave face was a life riddled with grief: left to care for her disturbed mother, two siblings with undiagnosed Schizophrenia and Charlotte herself burdened by depression and closeted lesbianism; she killed herself by drinking household disinfectant. In this unexpectedly gripping portrait of a life of passion unfulfilled, Penelope Fitzgerald brings all her novelist's skills into play in telling a story that is at once tragic, beautiful and deeply human.
Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of her remarkable family. `When I was very young I took my uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else in the world was not like them.' In this, only her second book, Penelope Fitzgerald turned her novelist's gaze on the quite extraordinary lives of her father and his three brothers. A masterly work of biography, within which we see Penelope Fitzgerald exercising her pen magnificently before she began her novel-writing career. Edmund Knox, her father, was one of the most successful editors of Punch. Dillwyn, a Cambridge Greek scholar, was the first to crack the Nazi's message decoding system, Enigma, and in so doing, is estimated to have shortened the Second World War by six months. Wilfred became an Anglo-Catholic priest and an active welfare worker in the East End of London. Ronald, the best known of the four during his lifetime, was Roman Catholic chaplain to Oxford University's student body, preacher, wit, scholar, crime-writer and translator of the Bible. A homage to a long-forgotten world and a fascinating account of the generation straddling the divide between late Victorian and Edwardian.
A collection of Penelope Fitzgerald's short stories. Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most highly-regarded writers on the English literary scene. Apart from Iris Murdoch, no other writer has been shortlisted so many times for the Booker. Her last novel, `The Blue Flower', was the book of its year, garnering extraordinary acclaim in Britain, America and Europe. This superb collection of stories, originally published in anthologies and newspapers, shows Penelope Fitzgerald at her very best. From the tale of a young boy in 17-century England who loses a precious keepsake and finds it frozen in a puddle of ice, to that of a group of buffoonish amateur Victorian painters on a trip to Brittany, these stories are characteristically wide ranging, enigmatic and very funny. They are each miniature studies of the endless absurdity of human behaviour.
Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, emerged late in life as one of the most remarkable English writers of the last century. The three novels in this volume all display her characteristic wit, intellectual breadth and narrative brilliance, applied to the different traditional forms into which she breathed new life. The Bookshop is a contemporary comedy of manners, set in a provincial town. InThe Gate of Angels romance is combined with the novel of ideas; while The Blue Flower revitalizes historical drama in a study of the eighteenth-century German writer Novalis. Fitzgerald being the genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched conceptual context, each book conjures up a different world in a few vivid pages which remain etched on the memory.
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