April 28, 2000

Details of the life of Penelope Fitzgerald (December 17, 1916 to April 28, 2000) are well known, subsequent to her books, but a few episodes will set our stage.

'In 1957, she moved with her husband and children from Hampstead to Southwold, on the East Suffolk coast, a town that had been completely cut off a few years earlier by the Big Flood of 1953: ‘an island between sea and river, muttering and drawing into itself as soon as it felt the cold,’ as Fitzgerald puts it in The Bookshop. They took up residence in an old oyster warehouse by the harbour, where the town dissolves into marshland on either side of the River Blyth. ‘Local stories of hauntings and spooky phenomena abounded,’ Hermione Lee writes in her biography of Fitzgerald. ‘A poltergeist plays a dramatic part in The Bookshop, and Fitzgerald always maintained that it was an absolutely real manifestation’.

'In 1960, the Fitzgeralds moved back to London, onto a houseboat named Grace, moored on the Thames at Chelsea Reach. Penelope’s husband Desmond, a lawyer, was drinking heavily and stealing from his chambers. He was caught, put on probation and disbarred. Three years into their life on the river, Grace sank, taking with her most of the family’s letters and books and possessions, but furnishing Fitzgerald with [some of] the material for.... Offshore...

Less known perhaps is an early book, a biography of her father and uncles: The Knox Brothers (1977). A. S. Byatt called this volume a "portrait of English intelligence."

And we like to feel this detail Fitzgerald includes is only seemingly a minor stage setter:

'Cambridge, as 1914 approached, was in a delicious turmoil over the rumor that the Master of Trinity had gone mad...King's was convulsed by new appointments...and by the disappearance of the porter's cat....'