Penelope Fitzgerald ─ A Life

The acclaimed biographer of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf gives us a vivid, intimate, and critically acute portrait of one of the finest and most understated novelists of the twentieth century.

Penelope Fitzgerald was a great English writer-many say the greatest in recent years-whose career didn't begin until she was nearly sixty. Her life moved from a Bishop's Palace to a sinking barge, from a life of teaching and obscurity to a blaze of renown. Her novels are short, spare masterpieces: subtle and intensely evocative. The early works draw on Fitzgerald's own experiences-working at the BBC in wartime; at a failing bookshop in Suffolk; at an eccentric stage school-while her later books open out into historical worlds that, magically, she seems to entirely possess. Despite the late start of her career, Fitzgerald's books won some of the most coveted awards in literature: the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hers is a story of lateness, persistence, and redemption. Now, Hermione Lee, a master biographer and one of Fitzgerald's greatest champions, gives us this remarkable author's unforgettable story.

Hermione Lee is a biographer, critic, teacher of literature, and president of Wolfson College, Oxford. Among her many works are literary biographies of Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, and Edith Wharton, and critical books on Elizabeth Bowen and Philip Roth. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was made a CBE in 2003 for services to literature, and a DBE in 2013 for services to literary scholarship. She lives in Oxford and Yorkshire.