Penelope Fitzgerald Summary

From virtually the outset of her career as a novelist, Penelope Fitzgerald's work has attracted serious critical attention. Her second novel, The Bookshop (1978), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize,... Read more

Critical Essay by Susannah Clapp Penelope Fitzgerald's first novel [The Golden Child] is a small, benign thriller set in a London museum. It has an amiable, mostly baffled hero, who worries ab... Read more

Critical Essay by Penelope Lively Penelope Fitzgerald's latest book, Human Voices, makes use of her experiences in the BBC during the war to give us another exercise in the fiction of economy ... Read more

Critical Essay by John Mellors [In The Bookshop] Penelope Fitzgerald paints the bleak East Anglian coast in a verbal equivalent of the watercolours which a local artist tries to persuade Florence to ... Read more

In the following review, Eder praises Fitzgerald’s deft use of details to evoke a sense of possibilities in her Gate of Angels. High wind and drenching rain lash the flat fenlands [in Penelo... Read more

In the following essay, Gitzen studies Fitzgerald’s use of compression in her novels, tracing common features including a short time span, a restriction of plot, and a minimum number of promine... Read more

In the following excerpt, Flower states that The Bookshop is “clearly one of [Fitzgerald’s best.”] Another backward glance must be made at the amazing career of Penelope Fitzge... Read more

In the following review, Hensher argues that Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower finally solidifies the author’s reputation. A little national pride has been restored, in the aftermath of th... Read more

In the following review, Raban lauds Fitzgerald’s ability to write as if from first-hand memory instead of historical research, especially in her Human Voices. If Penelope Fitzgerald has eve... Read more

In the following essay, Bawer traces the distinctive characteristics of Fitzgerald’s fiction and asserts that these features are most prominent in The Gate of Angels. Among the many symptoms... Read more

In the following review, Annan discusses the amount of detail Fitzgerald manages to put into The Blue Flower. The German Romantics were drunk with ideas, and Novalis was the drunkest. He is the her... Read more

In the following review, Gardam praises Fitzgerald’s ability to draw a convincing setting and set of characters in The Blue Flower. ‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history&#x... Read more

In the following review, Eder describes the mosaic quality of Fitzgerald’s writing in The Blue Flower. It is not certain that God makes a distinction between Beethoven’s writing the W... Read more