Hermione Lee - Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2013 by Hermione Lee

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House company. Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of the Random House Group Ltd., London, in 2013.

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Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lee, Hermione.
Penelope Fitzgerald : a life / by Hermione Lee.
pages cm
This is a Borzoi book.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-385-35234-5 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-35235-2 (eBook)
1. Fitzgerald, Penelope. 2. Women novelists, English20th centuryBiography. I. Title.
PR 6056. I 86 Z 74 2014
823.914dc23
[B] 2013047581

Front-of-jacket photograph by Tara Heinemann/Camera Press/Redux
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

First United States Edition

v3.1

For John Barnard

If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching.

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

Most of the illustrations in the text are black-and-white copies of Penelope Fitzgeralds own artworkdrawings and watercolours used as book plates, book markers, illustrations to her poems (on ), Christmas and birthday cardsapart from the following:

Telegram from Mopsa to her mother, announcing her scholarship to Somerville, 26 March 1935

Isis magazine, 19 May 1938

Cover of World Review, June 1951

Jassy of Juniper Farm, words by Penelope Fitzgerald, drawings by Bill White; Swift, 1 March 1958

Ellen Terry wearing her beetle-wing gown for Lady Macbeth, 1888, the model for Freddies gown

Edward Burne-Jones design, William Morris; detail from the title page of A Book of Verse, 1870

Poetry Bookshop Rhyme Sheet: There is a lady sweet and kind, illustrated by C. Lovat Fraser

The Poetry Bookshop, 35 Devonshire Street, London

Book of Alpine Flowers, given by Desmond to Penelope, 1965

Memorial Service programme, 10 October 2000

PLATE SECTION I

All pictures, unless otherwise stated, are used by kind permission of Tina and Terence Dooley.

The Knox family

Bishop Knox

Bishop Hicks

Winnie Knox (Colin Knox)

Eddie (Evoe) Knox going to war, 1915

Christina Hicks as debutante, 1903 (Belinda Hunt)

Bishops son weds Bishops daughter, September 1912 (Tim Hicks)

Christina Knox and baby Rawle, 1914 (Tim Hicks)

Mops on the beach, circa 1920

Brother and sister, 1924

The village of Hampstead in the 1920s (Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre)

Deerhaddnn School, Eastbourne (Jonathan Seaman, Eastbourne Borough Council)

Penelope Knox, 1930

Evoe Knox, 1930s

Evoe, Mary Shepard and Mops, late 1930s

Penelope Knox, the blonde bombshell

Willie Conder (Anne Conder)

Janet Russell (Penny Lee)

Penelope and Jean Fisher

Penelope and Oliver Breakwell with Free French soldiers, Hyde Park, September 1940 (Penny Lee)

Oliver Breakwell (Penny Lee)

Hugh Lee (Penny Lee)

Lieutenant Desmond Fitzgerald, 1940

The wedding of Desmond Fitzgerald and Penelope Knox, 15 August 1942

Jean Fisher as bridesmaid

Evoe and Mary Knox, with Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald

Mary Knox and Penelope Fitzgerald, 1945 (Elisabeth Barnett)

Squires Mount, Hampstead (authors own)

Chestnut Lodge, next door to Squires Mount (authors own)

Desmond and his daughters, Tina and Maria, 1954

Penelope painting, on holiday with the Fishers, 1950s (Elisabeth Fisher)

Penelope at Blackshore House, Southwold, 1957

Tina and Valpy on holiday in Europe, 1955

At home on Grace: Maria, early 1960s

Desmond in Earls Court Road, 1964

Penelope in Agnes Riley Gardens, next to Poynders Gardens, 1974

PLATE SECTION II

The wedding of Valpy and Angelines, Crdoba, 31 July 1967 (Valpy Fitzgerald)

Penelope Fitzgerald at her sons wedding (Valpy Fitzgerald)

Desmond and Penelope, early 1970s

Penelope in 1975 (Maria Fitzgerald)

Penelope in Russia, 1975

Penelope in China, 1977 (Maria Fitzgerald)

Maria Fitzgeralds wedding, 1978 (Maria Fitzgerald)

The writer at her desk, Almeric Road, 1980

Publisher Richard Ollard and cousin Oliver Knox (Charlotte Knox)

Rawle Knox, New Delhi, 1950 (Belinda Hunt)

Penelope and her cousin Tony Peck

Rachel Hichens, ne Ollivant: one of the oldest friends (Elisabeth Barnett)

Colin Haycraft and Beryl Bainbridge at Gloucester Crescent (from Martin Stoddard, Colin Haycraft: Maverick Publisher, Duckworth, 1995)

Winning the Booker Prize for Offshore, 23 October 1979

Winner of the Booker Prize, publicity shot

Being congratulated, with Maria

Edward Burne-Jones with his granddaughter, Angela MacKail (London Borough of Hammersmith Public Libraries)

Penelopes hero, William Morris ( Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

Charlotte Mew, 1923 (photograph National Portrait Gallery, London)

Living alone in St. Johns Wood and writing Charlotte Mew, 198283

Penelope with Maria, Sophie and Tom Lake, 1990 (Maria Fitzgerald)

Penelope with Alfie Lake, Highgate Woods, 1990s (Maria Fitzgerald)

At Penelope Livelys house, with Jack Lively, 1981 (Penelope Lively)

Winning the Golden Pen Award, with Maria, 1999 (Maria Fitzgerald)

The eightieth-birthday party at Bishops Road, 7 September 1996

The eightieth-birthday party at Caf Rouge, Highgate, 28 December 1996, with Valpy and sister-in-law Helen

Outside 27A Bishops Road, July 1999 ( Ellen Warner)

Every effort has been made by the publishers to trace the holders of copyright. Any inadvertent omissions of acknowledgement or permission can be rectified in future editions.

This is the biography of a great English writer who would never have described herself in such a commanding way. She wrote nine short novels, three biographies, some remarkable stories, many fine essays and reviews, and many letters. It is not a vast output. Her life is partly a story about latenesspatience and waiting, a late start and late style. In some ways she was like other women writers of her generation who began to publish in middle or old age. But she was not quite like anyone else.

She began as a brilliant young woman from an exceptional family, of whom much was expected. She spent many years as a housewife and mother, often in dramatically difficult circumstances, teaching, and, apparently, not writing. She started publishing books at sixty, and became famous at eighty. Her books were short, and hard to pin down. She wrote about her own life, but kept herself carefully concealed. She changed direction radically in her last four novels. They moved from using the material of her own life to creating astonishingly vivid and persuasive historical worlds, each one quite different, each one minutely researched, but with the research cunningly kept down. All are strange and original masterpieces.