The Patient Penelope Fitzgerald

Even before I started writing a novel about a lost season in the life of English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, I was worried about her. When she died 25 years ago this year, she was at the height of her fame in the United States. She’d been nominated for the Booker Prize three times and won it once, but it was winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1997 (for her last novel, The Blue Flower), at the age of 80, that boosted her career across the pond. Though she’d been published here previously in the 1970s, a wider American readership only found her through the Mariner paperbacks reissued in the ’90s by the late Christopher Carduff.

A decade after her death, her letters were published in So I Have Thought of You, inspiring another wave of appreciation. A few years after that, Hermione Lee published a biography, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, precipitating another outpouring. Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Sebastian Faulks, Hilary Mantel, and James Wood are among the prominent writers who have written about Fitzgerald’s work, often admitting to a bit of awe, even befuddlement. One of my favorite quotes is from Faulks: “Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality—the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window.”

So why am I worried about her? Because for reasons I cannot fathom, her literary reputation seems to be lagging behind those of her English contemporaries, namely Muriel Spark and Anita Brookner. My evidence for this is the eight years I have been working on my novel, Fonseca, about a curious, three-month trip she made to northern Mexico with her young son in 1952. I’ve asked almost everyone I’ve encountered about her. Most of the time, Spark and Brookner are household names, whereas Penelope Fitzgerald creates confusion. There’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, of course, and Penelope Lively, and it can take a moment to sort that out. Every once in a while, I will see a flash of recognition in someone’s eyes, and on those occasions it’s all I can do not to immediately envelop the person in a hug.

I don’t intend to make a definitive statement here about motherhood and writing, but the facts of Spark, Brookner, and Fitzgerald’s lives may speak for themselves. When the poet Cyril Connolly issued his famous slam on parenthood in 1938—“There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall”—Muriel Spark was 20, Penelope Fitzgerald was 22, and Anita Brookner was 10. All would eventually have successful literary careers, but they followed radically different paths:

Spark married, divorced, and abandoned her only child to be raised by her parents in Edinburgh while she settled in London. She was nominated for the Booker three times but never won. She wrote 35 books (22 novels, four poetry collections, and nine short story collections).

Fitzgerald married, had three children, and worked constantly to keep the family afloat while caring for an alcoholic husband. She was also nominated for the Booker three times and won once (in 1979, for Offshore). She wrote 13 books (nine novels, three biographies, and one posthumously published short-story collection).

And finally, Brookner, youngest of the three, never married, never wanted to, and had no children. She won the Booker once and wrote 29 books (26 novels, two works of art history, and one novella).

I hate to admit how much I’ve studied their biographies, wondering if there is some pattern to be discerned, some golden ratio. Does marriage result in a third the number of books published? Or is the number of children the great reducer? I’ve thought so much about Fitzgerald’s long wait to publish, how she must have watched her contemporaries bring out novel after novel while she held her family together. Her first novel, The Golden Child, was written just before she turned 60, as an entertainment for her husband in his final illness. After he died, she averaged a book every two years until her death.

I do not mean to pit these writers against each other, merely to state the facts, and clearly Spark was a better writer than mother, whatever her initial intentions may have been. Many of Brookner’s novels, for all the time she had to write, focus on the same theme (the lonely, single woman). Fitzgerald was the only one who succeeded in both realms. Long ago, Elizabeth McCracken, another writer I admire, said, “We all write with everything we have and for some of us that includes children, and for some of us it does not.” I believe this. But if I can refresh Fitzgerald’s literary legacy—one writer-mother helping another—I’d like to.

Another thing that concerns me, also gleaned from my conversations of the past eight years: Too many readers new to Fitzgerald start with The Blue Flower. It may be her masterpiece and the best-known of her novels in the United States, but it is not my favorite, and it wasn’t hers, either. Whenever I can, I tell people to start with my favorite and hers: The Beginning of Spring, about Frank Reid, a hapless English printer muddling through a domestic crisis in pre-revolutionary Russia. It is historical fiction, but I believe there is a fair bit of autobiography in Frank’s wife’s journey. After that, if you’re as hooked as I hope you will be, here is the order I suggest. It’s not a ranking, just the order in which I think her novels are best read for maximum enjoyment and appreciation of her brilliance:

• The Bookshop: Protagonist Florence Green, who opens a bookshop in the coastal town of Hardborough, Suffolk, is every bit the heroine Muriel Spark’s Jean Brodie is. Isabel Coixet made this book into a film in 2017, starring Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, and Patricia Clarkson.
• Offshore: one of her more straightforwardly autobiographical novels about a band of misfits living on houseboats along the Thames.
• At Freddie’s: about an iconoclast and those under her influence at a school for child actors in London.
• Human Voices: about various machinations within the BBC radio headquarters during World War II, based on Fitzgerald’s time working there.
• The Gate of Angels: campus politics in the fictional college of St. Angelicus at Cambridge at the dawn of modern physics.
• Innocence: set in Italy, the first of her historical novels, with a cameo by Antonio Gramsci.
• The Blue Flower: based on the early life of Friedrich von Hardenberg, who would become the German Romantic poet Novalis.
• The Golden Child: her first novel, a comic murder mystery set in a museum and a total delight, but you can skip it unless you are a truly devoted fan at this point.

From here, move straight to Fitzgerald’s biographies. Start with The Knox Brothers, about her father (the editor of Punch) and his three remarkable brothers (a mathematician who helped crack the Enigma code and two priests). Then either her biography of the poet Charlotte Mew or the painter Edward Burne-Jones, depending on your preference.

Recently I came across a description of Fitzgerald that troubled me. It referred to her as “one of the most quietly brilliant novelists of the twentieth century.” The problem lies in that word quietly. To be frank, and with apologies to Connolly, I think there is no more somber enemy of good art than calling it quiet. What is quiet? Subtle? Off-trend? Is this a way to say that it took longer for readers and critics to recognize the artist’s genius? When is the last time a great male writer or his work was called quiet?

Fitzgerald was not quiet. She was patient, and there is a world of difference.