Her mother, Christine Hicks Knox, was, according to
The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, "a moderate suffragette." Fitzgerald graduated from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1939 with first-class honors in English. In 1941 she married Desmond Fitzgerald. Although she devoted much time to her husband and three children, Fitzgerald has worked, among other occupations, as a bookshop clerk, RPA (Recorded Programmes Assistant) for the British Broadcasting Corporation, a teacher (part-time with Westminster tutors), and a journalist, contributing frequently to the
London Review of Books and
The New York Times Book Review. Her first published book was a biography of the English artist Edward Burne-Jones (1975).
The majority of Fitzgerald's fictional characters can be identified with occupations, often jobs that she has held. Fitzgerald's novels have often been praised for their fluid, spare style, but there is an undertow beneath this seemingly smooth surface. Set within historical contexts characterized by economic, political, or cultural upheaval, her novels acknowledge the loss of paradise, with an awareness that what passes for innocence in this world is, at best, a self-serving parody of its ancient precursor. As does the novelist Evelyn Waugh, Fitzgerald describes this "decline and fall" in terms of venerable institutions and families.
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