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How Penelope Fitzgerald became a late blooming novelist

“It is a peculiar thing to take a step forward in middle age, but having done it I don’t intend to retreat.”

This long accretion of knowledge is something separate from her childhood and Oxford education, and is an essential part of the explanation to the question, ‘Howdid she do it?’ If we want to understand how she created what Wendy Lesser calls the Russianness and Germanness of her late books, we have to look to her life as a teacher, student, and traveller, not just as a put-upon wife of squashed brilliance. It is easy to see the influence of Desmond on her later life, but it is sensible to ask, as James Wood did, whether “some Knoxian combination of insecurity and confidence held her back until she could be sure of avoiding public failure?” If so, it makes sense that she would dwell on the fact that she won the Booker Prize as an outsider, because in her words the judges “ruled out novels evidently written with one eye on film rights.” For myself, I shall call to mind only the view from the College Library, as the dark finally settles into the courts, and very faintly the sounds of evensong drifts on the chill airs in the sweet harmonious voices of the King’s choristers, and here and there a scholar twitches his curtains, seals his door, and draws up his chair to the pool of light beneath his solitary, gazing lamp.

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