Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) Read Free Page B

while she looked for her free pass in the tumult of her carrier bag. It must be there, surely, but no, after much dredging, it didn’t seem to be findable. I was by this point feeling – and perhaps exhibiting – a certain impatience, so I marched us to the ticket machine, bought our tickets, and squired her down the escalator to the Northern Line. As we waited for the train, she turned to me with an expression of gentle concern. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘Ido seem to have involved you in some low forms of transport.’ I was still laughing by the time I got home and opened her books to read those long-pondered inscriptions. In
The Beginning of Spring
she had written ‘best wishes – Penelope Fitzgerald’; while in
The Blue Flower –
a dedication that had taken considerably more thought – she had put ‘best wishes – Penelope’.
    Like her personal manner, her life and literary career seemed designed to wrong-foot, to turn attention away from the fact that she was, or would turn into, a great novelist. True, she came from a cultured background, having one father and three uncles among the multi-talented Knox brothers, whose communal biography she later wrote. Her father was editor of
Punch
; her mother, one of the first students at Somerville College, Oxford, also wrote. Penelope was in turn a brilliant student at Somerville: one of her finals examiners was so astounded by her papers that he asked his fellow dons if he could keep them, and later, apparently, had them bound in vellum. But after this public proof of distinction, throughout what might for others have been their best writing years, she became a wife and working mother (at
Punch
, the BBC, the Ministry of Food, then in journalism and teaching). She was fifty-eight by the time she published her first book, a biography of Burne-Jones. She then wrote a comic thriller,
The Golden Child
, supposedly to amuse her dying husband. In the period 1975–84 she published two more biographies and four more novels. Those four novels are all short, and written close to her own experiences: of running a bookshop, living on a houseboat, working for the BBC in wartime, teaching at a stage school. They are adroit, odd, highly pleasurable, but modest in ambition. And with almost any other writer you might think that, having used up her own life, she would – being now in her very late sixties – have called it a day. On the contrary: over the next decade, from 1986 to 1995, she published the four novels–
Innocence
,
The Beginning of Spring
,
The Gate of Angels
and
The Blue Flower –
by which she will be remembered. They are written far from her obvious life, being set, respectively, in 1950s Florence, pre-revolutionary Moscow, Cambridge in 1912 and late-eighteenth-century Prussia. Many writers start by inventing away from their lives, and then, when their material runs out, turn back to more familiar sources. Fitzgerald did the opposite, and by writing away from her own life she liberated herself into greatness.
    Even so, when public recognition came, it followed no obvious trajectory, and was attended by a marked level of male diminishment. In 1977 her non-fiction publisher, Richard Garnett, informed her dunderheadedly that she was ‘only an amateur writer’, to which she replied mildly, ‘I asked myself, how many books do you have to write and how many semicolons do you have to discard before you lose amateur status?’ The following year, after having been shortlisted for the Booker Prize with
The Bookshop
, she asked her fiction publisher, Colin Haycraft, if it would be a good idea to write another novel. He jocundly replied that if she went on writing fiction he didn’t want it blamed on him, and in any case already had too many short novels with sad endings on his hands. (Unsurprisingly, Fitzgerald took herself off to another publisher, and Haycraft claimed he had been misunderstood.) I remember Paul Theroux telling me how, as a Booker judge in 1979, he had