Penelope Fitzgerald
Penelope Fitzgerald was an acclaimed English author born on December 17, 1916, in Lincoln, England. The daughter of notable literary figures, she pursued her education at Somerville College, Oxford, where she graduated with first-class honors in 1939. Fitzgerald entered the literary world later in life, publishing her first novel, *The Golden Child*, at the age of fifty-nine, following the release of her biography of artist Edward Burne-Jones. Throughout her career, she received significant recognition for her novels, including *The Bookshop*, which was nominated for the Booker Prize, and *Offshore*, for which she won the prestigious award in 1979. Her works often drew inspiration from her own life experiences, such as her time working for the BBC and living on a barge on the Thames. Additionally, Fitzgerald contributed to literary scholarship through biographies and editing projects. Despite not achieving massive commercial success, her literary reputation grew over time, particularly in the United States, where she received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998. Fitzgerald passed away in London in 2000, leaving behind a legacy of critically acclaimed literature.
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Subject Terms
Penelope Fitzgerald
Author
- Born: December 17, 1916
- Birthplace: Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England
- Died: April 28, 2000
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
Penelope Fitzgerald was born in Lincoln, England, on December 17, 1916. She was the daughter of Edmund Valpy Knox, the editor of Punch magazine, and Christina Hicks Knox, who has been described as a “moderate” suffragette. Fitzgerald attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she took first-class honors in 1939. In 1953, she married Desmond Fitzgerald, and the couple had two children, Edmund Valpy and Maria.
Even though Fitzgerald had solid literary antecedents, she did not publish her first novel, The Golden Child (1977), until she was fifty-nine years old. Prior to publishing that novel, she had published her first book, a biography of British artist Edward Burne-Jones, in 1975. After her husband died in 1976, Fitzgerald published a biography of her father and her three uncles, titled The Knox Brothers (1977). In 1978, she published her second novel, The Bookshop, and the book was the first of her works to be nominated for the Booker Prize. She did not receive the Booker Prize for The Bookshop, but the following year she won the prize for her third novel, Offshore (1979). Fitzgerald’s seventh novel, The Beginning of Spring (1988), and her eighth novel, The Gate of Angels (1990), were both nominated for the Booker.
Fitzgerald based some of her fiction rather loosely on her own work experiences. Prior to becoming a writer, she had worked at the British Broadcasting Corporation in London, and her novel, Human Voices (1980), is set in that milieu. She had also been employed as a clerk in a bookstore, a locale reflected in her novel The Bookshop. Offshorereflects a time when she and her family lived in a barge on the Thames River.
During the 1980’s, Fitzgerald took on some scholarly projects. She edited an unpublished novel by William Morris titled A Novel on Blue Paper and wrote an introduction for the work, published in 1982. In 1984, she published a biography of Charlotte Mew, a poet who wrote in the early twentieth century. Fitzgerald’s last novel, The Blue Flower, was published in 1996. The book was nominated for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. At the age of eighty-one, Fitzgerald was named a judge on the 1998 Booker panel, a post of considerable prestige.
That Fitzgerald won a Booker Prize and was nominated for that prize multiple times probably served to cement her reputation in Great Britain. Her reputation in the United States was enhanced when, in 1998, she received the National Book Critics Circle Award; this was the first year that writers from countries other than the United States were eligible for the award. Fitzgerald was not a huge commercial success, either in the United States or in the United Kingdom, but her work has enjoyed a steadily increasing critical notice in both countries. She died in London in 2000.