Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life - Hardcover

Excellent. . . . Riveting. . . . It s a cliche of discourse about biographies to remark that a good one will send you racing back to read the subject s works. In this case, it happens to be true in a mighty way.
Dwight Garner, "The New York Times"
[A] superbly intelligent biography. . . . Remarkable. . . . A revelation. . . . The story that Lee s biography tells . . . is not about patience on a monument but about talent buried under a heavy plinth, and discovered only just in time.
James Wood, "The New Yorker"
"Lee's book is a championing critical biography giving richly illuminating consideration to each of Fitzgerald's undefinable books. . . . Lee understands the importance of the life of ideas, of intellectual curiosity and imaginative obsession that are as much a part of the novelist's life as love affairs, parenthood, and moving house. . . . A study in imaginative abundance and in connections, of body, mind, and spirit. It is, very movingly, a picture of a whole past life, abounding no doubt in secrets Fitzgerald herself would have liked untold, but telling them with a reverence for her subject that is felt on every page."
Alan Hollinghurst, "The New York Review of Books
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I can t praise Hermione Lee s elegant work enough, whether for its clear prose, clever organization (she discusses Fitzgerald s early novels when relating the events that inspired them), insightful criticism or amusing and horrifying anecdotes. . . . Any admirer of Penelope Fitzgerald s work or, for that matter, any passionate reader will enjoy this capacious, masterly biography. Like its subject s own late flowering, it is a triumph.
Michael Dirda, "The Washington Post"
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An extraordinarily fine portrayal of the relationship between this author s life and her attraction to her chosen subject, in Lee s words: characters at odds with their world: the depressives, the shy, the unworldly, the emotionally inarticulate . . . . It is clear from the various sharp remarks reported by Lee, that Fitzgerald knew exactly who she was, and never allowed the circumstances of her life the blighted prospects, descent into poverty and homelessness, marital trials, crumby jobs, condescension from literary insiders to blind her to her own gift and greatness.
Katherine A. Powers, "The Christian Science Monitor"
Lee s exhaustive research and immense storytelling talent result in a captivating read about a woman who lived most of her life on the sidelines. . . . Lee takes ample time to discuss in depth Fitzgerald s work in biography and fiction, her struggles with her publishers, her circle of friends and her role as outsider in a sea of younger, better dressed literary wunderkinds. . . . With great respect, and an innate sense of the underappreciated, Lee shines a brilliant light on Fitzgerald s long life of making do, and making art in the process.
Meganne Fabrega, "Minneapolis Star Tribune"
Gloriously illuminates the separate talents of two distinguished ladies of letters.
"The Economist"
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. . . . 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. . . . [Lee] shines a searching light on Fitzgerald s pages. . . . 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 . . . . Fitzgerald wrote of the courage of reticence, and Lee has heard her.
Stacy Schiff, "The New York Times Book Review"
Brilliant . . . Lee catches not only the tempo of each decade, but how values from Fitzgerald s past constantly inform her present.
Jackie Wullschlager, "Financial Times"
Rarely has a literary biography been more needed or necessary than in Fitzgerald s case. . . . She was a writer of genius. . . . Lee is as direct as she can be about the episodes and phases of life that Fitzgerald preferred to pass over in silence. Her research is meticulous. She has combed the drafts of unfinished work, publisher s internal memos, private letters, reviews and more. Her conclusion is a statement of biographical honesty.
Ruth Scurr, "The Wall Street Journal"
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Marvelous. . . . Master biographer Hermione Lee illuminates the life of Fitzgerald. . . . Lee does a brilliant job of revealing Fitzgerald s method: comprehensive research combined with a self-effacing way of parlaying her hard-won knowledge into elusive stories that seem to take their surroundings casually for granted. She illuminates something similar in Fitzgerald s own character too a half-feigned vagueness or dottiness mixed with a tough tenacity that not only made her steady stream of books possible, once she got going, but made them what they were.
Michael Upchurch, "The Seattle Times"
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Hermione Lee's sensitive, respectful biography traces the life of a woman as elusive and enigmatic as her fiction. . . . [Lee] takes evident pleasure in depicting the fulfilled and happy years before her death in 2000. Yet the most memorable portions of this unsentimental, moving biography chronicle decades of sorrow and struggle, making palpable the weight of experience Fitzgerald transmuted into fiction of such remarkable grace and deceptive ease.
Wendy Smith, "Newsday"
Thrilling. . . . Pithy. . . . Pleasingly impressionistic. . . . Lee, a long-time fan of Fitzgerald s, wanted to tell the story of a mysterious and brilliant person who spent a great deal of time pretending to be an absent-minded old lady, losing the trail of anyone who might get to know her, especially, perhaps, a biographer. . . . The expectation for a literary biography is that the secrets come out. But because of the way Fitzgerald obscured, with that performative public personality, who she really was, we have never really known her before now. In the case of this biography, the real secret to come out is Penelope Fitzgerald. . . . The primary result of Lee s structural conceit is a lightly uncanny doubling of Fitzgerald s life and her work, lending the biography some of the dramatic irony of a novel. She brings us into the day of Fitzgerald s Booker win knowing the woman they were mocking that day was no befuddled aunty, but the one-time star of Oxford s literary scene, rising to the fore at last. . . . That persona was her own long joke on those who taunted her all those years ago. Thanks to Lee s sumptuous biography, we know just how funny it was.
Alexander Chee, "Slate"
Literary biography at its best a masterly discussion of the work of that fine novelist.
Penelope Lively
Deliriously entertaining . . . Beautifully evoked . . . [Lee s] intense, close-up analyses of each book would have thrilled Fitzgerald.
John Walsh, "The Sunday Times" (London)
The biography of the year . . . An extraordinary portrait of an English literary life.
Robert McCrum, "The Observer "(London)
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. . . . 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.
"Kirkus Reviews"
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.
"Publishers Weekly" (boxed, starred)"

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’ S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A Best Book of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times
Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography

The acclaimed biographer of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf gives us an intimate portrait of one of the most quietly brilliant novelists of the twentieth century.

Penelope Fitzgerald was a great English writer whose career didn't begin until she was nearly sixty. She would go on to win some of the most coveted awards in literature—the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Now, in an impeccable match of talent between biographer and subject, Hermione Lee, a master biographer and one of Fitzgerald's greatest champions, gives us this remarkable writer’s story. Lee’s critical expertise is on dazzling display on every page, as it illuminates this extraordinary English life. Fitzgerald, born into an accomplished intellectual family, the granddaughter of two bishops, led a life marked by dramatic twists of fate, moving from a bishop’s palace to a sinking houseboat to a last, late blaze of renown. We see Fitzgerald’s very English childhood in the village of Hampstead; her Oxford years, when she was known as the “blonde bombshell”; her impoverished adulthood as a struggling wife, mother and schoolteacher, raising a family in difficult circumstances; and the long-delayed start to her literary career.

Fitzgerald’s early novels draw on her own experiences—working at the BBC in wartime, at a bookshop in Suffolk, at an eccentric stage school in the 1960s—while her later books open out into historical worlds that she, magically, seems to entirely possess: Russia before the Revolution, postwar Italy, Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis. Fitzgerald’s novels are short, spare masterpieces, and Hermione Lee unfurls them here as works of genius. Expertly researched, written out of love and admiration for this wonderful author’s work, Penelope Fitzgerald is literary biography at its finest—an unforgettable story of lateness, persistence and survival.