Review by Choice Review
Prize-winning author of Edith Wharton (CH, Nov'97, 35-1380), Willa Cather (1990), and Virginia Woolf (CH, Jan'08, 45-2476), Lee (Univ. of Oxford, UK) here gives British writer Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) the royal treatment in a work that is as much social history as it is biography. To understand Fitzgerald, Lee suggests, her family's background in Edwardian England has to be thoroughly investigated, for there among churchmen and women's rights advocates, writers and educators, she learned the virtues of understatement that formed the background of her novels and biographies. Fitzgerald is not an easy person to know even when she writes about her family, but Lee does well interpreting the nuances of her subject's narratives. The result is a deeply grounded but sometimes ponderous biography. Fitzgerald, who was highly valued for her brief novels, might have been dismayed at the lengths to which her biographer goes. Still, this magisterial work brings Fitzgerald's world alive and illuminates the sources of her novels, which gradually moved farther afield to encompass Russia before the revolution and the life of the Romantic writer Novalis-a significant accomplishment for a writer who published her first book when she was approaching the age of 60. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Carl Rollyson, Bernard M. Baruch College, CUNY
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
ALL BIOGRAPHICAL SUBJECTS MISBEHAVE; every biographical subject misbehaves in his own way. Among the worst offenders may be the stoic and the selfless. They are only slightly less discourteous than the diary-destroyers, though neither holds a candle to the author of the matchless (and accurate) memoir. Then there is the subject who leaves his biographer to flounder with years to go. Could there be anything worse than Dashiell Hammett's three decades of writer's block? Indeed there could be: That would be the late bloomer, the great writer who publishes her first book at 58, to become fafully with a selection of his letters (edited by Thwaite) and a biography (written by Motion). Unfortunately for Larkin's image - which had been fairly staid until then, the poet having lived a quiet and mostly provincial life as a university librarian - it became evident that he had indulged himself in racist and sexist language. It had not occurred to the executors that they might have prefaced their respective volumes with a health warning in capital letters pointing out what should have been obvious: that Larkin talked that way only in his private life; that he believed his letters to be part of his private life, too; and that in his public life he was courteous and charming to anyone he met, of whatever gender or racial background. Plainly they hadn't thought it necessary. It shouldn't have been. But there were dunces waiting, who relished the chance to diminish him. A depressing number of British literary figures averred that it was no longer necessary to read Larkin's small body of work (he produced barely a hundred pages of poetry), and a few were dumb enough to say that it had never been any good in the first place. This reversal of estimation was too wild to stick. There were too many people - on both sides of the Atlantic, and anywhere else English is read and spoken - who simply loved Larkin's poems. In the last two decades that opinion has managed to reassert itself: an encouraging example of error wearing out its welcome. The chief virtue of Booth's new book, then, is not to advance a new opinion, but to sensibly demonstrate why the original remains the opinion that matters. Booth - a colleague of Larkin's for 17 years at the University of Hull and literary adviser to the Philip Larkin Society - is an excellent guide to just why a Larkin poem can merit being called great. He points out its features with the proud care of a well-suited senior BMW executive taking a turn in the salesroom. Sometimes he overdoes the enthusiasm. Discussing the mighty poem "The Whitsun Weddings," for instance, in which the narrator's train encounters wedding party after wedding party along its journey to London - "A dozen marriages got under way" - he notes the "unmistakable sexual implication" in the imagery ("there swelled/A sense of falling"). If the sexual implication were really unmistakable it wouldn't be worth any special notice. Speaking for myself, however, I can only say that it's so mistakable it never occurred to me. In those last lines of the poem Larkin isn't talking about sex, he's talking, with incomparable eloquence, about the present day flying onward to become the future. Yet Booth is sensitive enough not only to praise the master at his best but also to spot the moments when his sublime talent is not fully engaged. Toward the end, Larkin tried to repeat the success of "The Whitsun Weddings" by composing a similarly exalted hymn to traditional social values called "Show Saturday." Unfortunately, despite its typical care for detail and craft of assembly, "Show Saturday" is burdened with language that does not sing. "The poet seems listless and bemused, willing himself into enthusiasm for these quaint rituals," Booth writes, and that "listless" is especially well considered, exactly the right word. Booth's limiting estimation of "Show Saturday" counts as good critical sense, and thus serves to offset the strange moment when he includes the famous second-to-last line of "An Arundel Tomb" - "Our almost-instinct almost true" - among Larkin's "awkward felicities." In fact the line is about as un-awkward as a felicity can get. But Booth has not written an academic book. He has written a book of the higher journalism, which is still the kind of attention Larkin needs; although from now on, and partly because of Booth's book, he might need it less. The way will now be open for commentators on this most lyrically rich of modern poets to be as tin-eared as they like. Booth, in his own prose, is only occasionally deaf to rhythm. "He was not yet prepared to throw in the poetic towel" is a construction apt to induce a pain in the critical neck. But the sentence only limps, it doesn't just lie there and blow bubbles. More important, Booth has a good ear for Larkin's real-life speech. When Larkin helped to finance the publication of his first major collection, "The Less Deceived," by agreeing that it be sold by subscription, he privately called the subscribers "the sucker list." But he was joking, and one of the many merits of Booth's book is that he can spot Larkin's jokes. Larkin spoke and wrote the allusive, indirect and ironic tongue of the British literary world. In a time that grows more literal-minded almost as fast as it grows less literary, a tongue in the cheek will always need translating, especially to Americans, who expect honesty. larkin was a model of probity in his professional lives as a writer and a librarian, but in his love life he was not honest. The uncovering of his cover-ups is by now probably complete, although in view of his ability to attract women - an ability he made such a point, in his poetry, of saying he lacked - it won't be much of a surprise if a couple more turn up. With two conspicuous exceptions, the women we know about were reticent and decorous: Normally they would not have done such a thing, but Booth points out that their quiet lives, so short of excitement, might have been the exact reason they couldn't resist the charm of his company. He spoke well. Whether, lacking the hit rate of his handsome friend Kingsley Amis, Larkin was any great shakes after he had got them into bed is something most of us have been inclined to doubt until now, if only on the evidence of his poetry, which places great emphasis on his being left out of the sexual adventure. But one of the conspicuous exceptions, the semi-bohemian academic Monica Jones, was certainly keen to do anything for him when it came to the boudoir. Even more convincingly, the other conspicuous exception, Patsy Strang - an experienced man-eater with no patience for a merely spiritual relationship - was crazy about him until the end of her life, and long after their love affair was over she turned up begging for him to take her back. That kind of evidence doesn't make him Errol Flynn, but it does put a damper on his image as a chump. Perhaps pretending to be a sexual non-starter was part of Larkin's strategy. In the animal world, stealthy diffidence is sometimes a useful lead-up to a deadly leap. If so, it was one more deception, in the one area of his life where he really had something to be ashamed of. The man who wrote such a beautiful poem in tribute to Sidney Bechet ("Everyone making love and going shares -/Oh, play that thing!") couldn't really have been raceprejudiced even if he claimed to be. But the man who hid his women from one another was causing real damage, because some of them - and those the shyest, nicest and most decent - spent years being led up the garden path. It was cruel of him. Perhaps he just hated the idea of hurting them. Anyway, hurt them he did, a sad fact that Booth is ready to face. But he is also ready to face the even sadder fact that it took Larkin's injured psyche to produce the serene poems at which we now murmur in astonishment, mouthing the beautiful phrases as we read. mous at 80. Which is but one reason to be grateful that the life of that elusive, original miracle-worker, the English novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, falls to Hermione Lee, author of masterly lives of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, all written before her newest subject had begun to publish. Fitzgerald was not born to lateness. If anything she grew up steeped in literature. Her father hailed from an intensely clever clan that Fitzgerald would immortalize; he became the editor of Punch. She spent her childhood in hyper-literary Hampstead, where poets and painters walked the streets, and in a family where, she would write, "everyone was publishing, or about to publish, something." Her father's galley proofs served as the household writing paper. She pinned poems to her bedroom walls; she kept a commonplace book; she delivered a weekly news-sheet from boarding school. The late bloomer was decidedly precocious. Childhood ended abruptly with the death of her mother just before Fitzgerald arrived at Oxford. She quickly distinguished herself there, not only as a rosy-faced "blond bombshell," or because she spent the first 10 minutes of the morning lecture with the Times crossword puzzle. She could do in a single paragraph what took everyone else a full essay, a classmate would remember grudgingly and presciently. "We didn't feel the need to study modern literature," Fitzgerald would later say, because "we imagined we were going to write it." All seemed in order for a distinguished literary career. Nineteen-forty found Fitzgerald contributing film reviews to Punch. She married quickly, midwar, having met Desmond Fitzgerald, a dashing army officer who had studied for the bar. Together, in 1950, they took over World Review, a sort of hybrid of Encounter and Punch. Although Desmond was in charge, some editorials bore two signatures and, Lee remarks, "some of the writing signed by him sounds like her." A contributor noted, "He did most of the talking, but she was the brains." Over six years she gave birth to three children. The lateness more or less begins there. Neither the magazine nor the marriage could sustain itself. World Review lasted until 1953. Desmond went back to lawyering and soon discovered drinking. He was better at the second; noisy rows erupted. Penelope supported the family writing scripts for the BBC's schools' program. Soon enough their "shabby-smart bohemian environment" began to look more like poverty. Before turning 11, her elder daughter published a novel, nearly two decades before Fitzgerald would do so. At 43, she moved the family back to London to live on a barge. She also moved to the couch, where she spent the remainder of the marriage. She took teaching jobs; the family existed on fried eggs, potatoes and toast. Feckless Desmond wound up disbarred for pilfering from the firm. At home, the case was not discussed. He tried selling encyclopedias door to door. As if they weren't already foundering, the houseboat began to fill with water on a June Monday in 1963. Shortly thereafter, Fitzgerald arrived for class to deliver the immortal line: "I'm sorry I'm late, but my house sank." They lost almost everything. Ultimately a novel would emerge from that sodden mess. Their reality was "bleak, difficult and dangerous"; the novel, "Offshore," would win the Booker Prize. Already in her 50s, Fitzgerald looked like someone whose life had passed her by, "a middle-aged teacher, recovering from a traumatic period of homelessness and deprivation, living in a dreary council estate in South London with a disgraced alcoholic husband in a dismal low-paid job." Another immortal line floats about these years. In describing her father's early career, Fitzgerald slyly noted: "He wanted to write, and suffered, as generations of authors have done, at the stuffy and inky boredom of the classroom." When she observed as much she had been suffocating in ink for some 15 years. As she does so, we learn a great deal about a woman who is Penelope Fitzgerald and, of course, is not yet Penelope Fitzgerald; hers is a life that lends new meaning to the term "juvenilia." She loves bullfights. She cheats at games, including croquet, even at Lotto with a 3-year-old grandchild. She is a lousy mother-in-law. She spends a lot of time painting furniture and bathtubs. She enjoys nearly anything more than writing, proof she might just be a writer. For all they cost her, she didn't mind the bicycles in the hall. There is a reason when - as a scatty, harriedlooking "caricature of a schoolmarm" - she begins to write, she turns out to be a protector of the confused, a lover of lost worlds and causes, rhapsodic on uncertainty and ambivalence. The children's educations, the handdrawn Christmas cards, the family holidays, the film-going, all crowd in. It's Page 200, and we're still waiting for the cavalry to show, for Fitzgerald to sit down and write one of her masterpieces already. After one of the longest limbering-ups in literary history she finally did, devoting four years to a biography of the painter Edward Burne-Jones. She began it as a hobby and without a contract. By the time the book was published, in 1975, she was nearly 60. It convinced her of little. "I'm not a professional writer," she told a friend three years later, "but only very anxious to write one or two things which interest me." As if to make up for all else, she turned out "The Bookshop," her fourth book, in a matter of weeks. Her draft began, "Experiences aren't given us to be 'got over,' otherwise they would hardly be experiences." In these pages, Lee could not always be said to agree: The death of Fitzgerald's father preceded the first publications, her husband's fatal illness preceded the fiction. If there is a connection - if there is more to be said about the years on the sofa, or what Fitzgerald herself refers to as the explosive, room-clearing family temper - it isn't here. Lee's delicate portrait is entirely in keeping with the spirit of a woman who sneaks the line "Writers' families, in small houses, suffer greatly" into an account of her father's early career, otherwise known as her childhood. The restraint comes off less as deference than solidarity. Certainly Fitzgerald never tried to explain the inexplicable. If there is a poltergeist in the first act, she teaches us, it is perfectly likely to be there, rapping away and still unexplained, in the last. Between 1978, when she still did not think of herself as a professional writer, and 1982, Fitzgerald would turn out four novels - crafty, delicate, oblique, baffling comic masterpieces, all of them works of tamped-down force and intense compression, as if the decades-long wait worked some kind of clarifying, crystallizing magic. She was, she said with regret, "an old writer who has never been a young one." Despite the echoes of Beckett and Turgenev, she is also a distinctly English writer, because, she explained, the Englishman considers "life not important enough to be tragic and too serious to be comic." Here Lee leaps into action, the neurosurgeon rolling up her sleeves after having completed rounds, delighted finally to be back in the O.R. She shines a searching light on Fitzgerald's pages, even examining a 1914 Baedeker for passages Fitzgerald cannibalized for her Russian novel, "The Beginning of Spring." Lee is hilarious on the descriptions of the writer who comported herself, as Julian Barnes put it, like "some harmless jam-making grandmother who scarcely knew her way in the world"; cleareyed on Fitzgerald's vexed relations with publishers; guarded about how a woman who cheated at the card table with a preschooler felt about losing the Booker Prize three times. Fitzgerald wrote of the courage of reticence, and Lee has heard her. We know perfectly well how the daughter's 1960 publication - a witty tale of an impoverished family - must have felt. Fitzgerald died in 2000, at 83. Her children laid her ashes to rest, Lee tells us, next to those of her father. Larkin was a model of probity in his professional lives, but in his love life he was not honest. CLIVE JAMES'S "Poetry Notebook: 2006-2014," a collection of essays and criticism, was recently published in Britain. STACY SCHIFF, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is the author, most recently, of "Cleopatra: A Life." She is currently at work on "The Witches," about 1692 Salem.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Although, sadly, not as well known in the U.S., Booker Prize winner Fitzgerald (1916-2000) was a powerhouse of British letters, particularly acclaimed for her novel The Blue Flower (1995). Fitzgerald's wide-ranging career was made all the more remarkable by the fact that she didn't publish her first work, a biography of the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burke-Jones, until she was nearly 60. Her life up to that point, however, provided her with rich source material upon which to draw. Hers was a bohemian existence in London during the 1960s and 1970s, a turbulent time in which she tried to raise a family in near poverty, suffering the misfortunes of her alcoholic husband. Fitzgerald herself once said that biographies should be written about people you love, and clearly, exceptional biographer Lee (Edith Wharton, 2007) is fully enamored of her subject. Extensively researched and exuberantly detailed, Lee's examination delves the depths and heights of this roller-coaster life while meticulously deconstructing each of Fitzgerald's works. A first-rate trove of literary criticism and background that lovers of literature will find invaluable.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Booker Prize-winning novelist Fitzgerald (who died in 2000) once observed, "I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost." In this illuminating biography, critic and scholar Lee (The Novels of Virginia Woolf) shows how Fitzgerald's characters were drawn not just from real life but from her own life. Fitzgerald was born into a remarkably accomplished and well-connected family of clerics and writers: her father was the editor of the humor magazine Punch; an aunt (Winifred Peck) and uncle (Ronald Knox) were well-known authors; and their circle of acquaintances included Evelyn Waugh, Lytton Strachey, A.A. Milne, and other literary celebrities. "Mops" studied at Oxford and wrote radio plays for the BBC during WWII, but lived mostly in the shadow of her accomplished relatives. She got her chance to shine co-editing the cultural magazine World Review with her husband in 1950, but when the magazine folded in 1953, their lives fell apart and the couple and their three children spent years living in poverty aboard decrepit houseboats in London. Fitzgerald began publishing novels in 1977, at age 61, and Lee does an exceptional job of drawing lines of association between the author's life and fiction. She mines details from Fitzgerald's journals and notes to fill in the blanks of her famously self-effacing subject. Her observations have the vitality of Fitzgerald's own reflective prose, and she writes with sympathy and clarity. Agent: Zoe Pagnamenta, Zoe Pagnamenta Agency. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
British biographer Lee, whose previous subjects include Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, here tackles an English novelist who is not as well known as these other writers, at least in the United States. Fitzgerald (1916-2000) did win a Booker Prize, and she had some success during her lifetime, especially from critics and the reading public. While she wrote a number of short novels, as well as a few biographies, her writing career started when she was middle-aged, so her output is comparatively limited. Also, she was very reticent about herself; in interviews she avoided discussing her family and other private information. Lee, who met and interviewed Fitzgerald toward the end of the novelist's life, vividly evokes the times in which Fitzgerald lived, how her experiences shaped her fiction, and how her personality can be gleaned from her works. Fitzgerald could be both charming and critical, sharp-tongued and loving, but eminently worth reading. VERDICT Just as Fitzgerald, in her biography of British poet Charlotte Mew, made her subject come alive, so Lee, in this scrupulously researched and sympathetic portrait of a worthy and accomplished novelist, makes a strong case for renewed interest in Fitzgerald's works. Highly recommended for anyone interested in well-written literary biographies. [See Prepub Alert, 5/12/14.]-Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Lee (President/Wolfson Coll., Oxford; Biography: A Very Short Introduction, 2009) devotes her considerable talents for biography to Penelope Knox Fitzgerald (1916-2000), who didn't publish her first book until the age of 58. The author presents the story of Fitzgerald's initially charmed life and her days at Oxford in the wildly political 1930s, where she discovered John Ruskin and William Morris, her intellectual heroes. She was preceded at Oxford by her mother, her father, the editor of Punch, and his brothers, and that earlier generation set a standard for intellectual writing that Penelope inherited. Her husband, Desmond Fitzgerald, was equally talented but eventually drank away his career and life. For a time, the couple endured abject poverty, at one point living on an old barge in the Thames. Those two years were the subject of the Booker Prize-winning Offshore (1979), which depicted their perpetually damp home, which required a high tide to flush the toilet. That adventure ended when the boat sank with all her notes and papers. Fortunately for readers, Lee had access to the copious notes Fitzgerald made for each of her books. Even for works of pure fiction, she researched the smallest, seemingly insignificant facts. Lee's biography will provide a vivid portrait for those who have not encountered Fitzgerald's work and will prove immensely satisfying for her many fans. The author reproduces pieces of her subject's writing at (occasionally too-) considerable length, but Fitzgerald's mastery of phrasing and the beauty of her work should lead readers back to her books, particularly The Bookshop (1977), which was shortlisted for the Booker, or The Blue Flower, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998. Another winning biography from Lee. Those who love Fitzgerald's work will tuck this book right next to her volumes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
