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Friday 5 December 2008

So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald

Do tell me some more about Devonshire

So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley

‘I can’t remember whether you said you liked Barbara Pym,’ Penelope Fitzgerald wrote to an old school friend around 1980, ‘but am sending Quartet in Autumn in case you haven’t got it, otherwise it can go to the Mothers’ Union Xmas sale. I do like her very much, the incidents look so trivial that there’s nothing in them and then you suddenly realise how much she’s said.’ The recommendation is typical in its lighthandedness and could also be mistaken for a fair summary of Fitzgerald’s own fiction at that time. But her work went further and deeper than Pym’s.

By then, she had written four more or less autobiographical novels, including the Booker-winning Offshore, about lives unravelling amid the tidal flux of the 1950s houseboat community in Battersea Reach. She was at work on her very funny next one, At Freddie’s, based on a period when she taught RE at the Italia Conti stage school. She had also published two biographies: of Edward Burne-Jones, then at the height of his revived popularity, and of the Knox brothers — her uncles Ronald, the Christian apologist and Catholic convert, Wilfred, a distinguished Anglican cleric, and Dillwyn, a classicist who led the first attempts to crack Enigma; and her father Evoe, who edited Punch.

All this work had appeared since 1975, when Fitzgerald was getting on for 60 and still helping to keep her war- damaged, improvident, travel-agent husband Desmond, their three clever children and herself afloat through tutoring and A-level marking. As for her earlier life, she was, as she said on her book jackets, an Oxford graduate who had worked in journalism, the wartime Ministry of Food, the BBC, a bookshop and various schools. She added that ‘the family used to live on a Thames barge, which sank’. She didn’t mention that they subsequently lived in a council flat in Clapham.

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