Fitzgerald, Penelope Mary Knox

▪ 2001

      British novelist and biographer (b. Dec. 17, 1916, Lincoln, Eng.—d. April 28, 2000, London, Eng.), was noted for her economical yet evocative, witty, and intricate works, which often concerned the efforts of her characters to cope with their life circumstances. Although she did not begin writing until she was in her late 50s, she published nine novels and three biographies and was honoured with some of literature's top awards. Fitzgerald attended boarding school at Wycombe Abbey in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and took first-class honours at Somerville College, Oxford. Following graduation (1939) she worked at the Ministry of Food and at the BBC, and in 1941 she married Desmond Fitzgerald. After she and her husband edited the short-lived literary-political journal World Review in the early 1950s, she managed a bookstore and then taught English at the Italia Conti stage school in London. Fitzgerald's first two books, the biographies Edward Burne-Jones and The Knox Brothers, appeared in 1975 and 1977, respectively, and later in 1977 she published her first novel, The Golden Child, which she wrote to entertain her husband, who was ill. A number of her early works of fiction, including The Bookshop (1978), Offshore (1979), Human Voices (1980), and At Freddie's (1982), drew on her own experiences; Offshore, which was inspired by the time she spent living on a houseboat, was awarded the Booker Prize. Fitzgerald produced another biography, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984), and then returned to fiction. Her later novels—Innocence (1986), The Beginning of Spring (1988), and The Gate of Angels (1990)—were historical in nature. Fitzgerald's last novel, The Blue Flower (1995), was prompted by a visit she made to a church in Bonn, Ger., and the hymns she heard there by the Romantic poet Novalis. For that book she was given the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998, the first non-American to be so honoured. A collection of Fitzgerald's stories, The Means of Escape, was published posthumously.

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