Why did Penelope Fitzgerald start writing so late? 

‘Experiences aren’t given us to be “got over”, otherwise they would hardly be experiences.’ The opening sentence of the first draft of The Bookshop, published in 1978 when Penelope Fitzgerald was 62, didn’t survive in the finished version, but its author had found her voice, and, in a way, her subject. She had learnt how to look back.

She had begun publishing only four years earlier, with a life of Edward Burne-Jones. There followed a thriller, written to amuse her husband as he lay dying, and a second biography, The Knox Brothers. This was about her father, ‘Evoe’ Knox, editor of Punch and author of light verse, and his three brothers, two of whom became priests in different denominations. The book portrayed a group of gifted motherless children rattling around their father’s Edwardian rectory: ‘The boys were beginning to resemble savages, speaking Latin and Greek.’ The youngest, Ronnie, asked, aged four, what he liked doing, replied: ‘I think all day, and at night I think about the past.’ Fitzgerald’s interest in the battle between intellect and emotion, the closeness of belief to its opposite, and her ear for understatement and desperate cheer are all evident in this family memoir. But it was as a late-flowering novelist that she would refine these interests into lucid and extraordinarily compressed works of art.

Fitzgerald’s eight novels were attended with plaudits and prizes in marked contrast with the invisibility of the people she wrote about, or the self that she presented to the world. All her work played variations on the theme of minders not mattering, and matterers not minding. She was the miracle-worker in the middle of that bleak adage.

Why did it take her so long to get going? We learn that, accustomed to the unusual at home in Hampstead, she was miserably brilliant at Wycombe Abbey.