Although she has worked in journalism, in the BBC, and in teaching, and still teaches part-time at a London tutorial college, she feels her most important work was rearing her three children. Work, however, which most people spend most of their time doing, is an area she thinks many novelists neglect: she has drawn on her own experience to present in each of her novels a small, specialist world which she opens for the reader's inspection.
In common with thousands of people in London in the winter of 1971-1972, Fitzgerald waited in line for hours to see the Tutankhamen Exhibition at the British Museum. Her mystery novel, The Golden Child, originated in her feelings of anger at the sheer length of the wait, and of anticlimax at the brief glimpse of the dimly lit treasures at the end of it. She felt that to discover, after all that, that the treasures were fakes could lead to murder! The Golden Child of the title is the centerpiece of an exhibition of the legendary treasures of the Garamantes on loan to a stately British museum.
