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.

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 prominent characters.

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.

In the following review, Holmes traces the course of Fitzgerald’s career that eventually led her to write The Blue Flower.

In the following review, Hensher argues that Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower finally solidifies the author’s reputation.

In the following review, Charters provides a brief overview of Fitzgerald’s life and career and how the author’s experience working at the BBC during World War II provided the basis for Human Voices.

In the following review, Kermode asserts that Fitzgerald’s skillful use of detail in The Blue Flower convincingly renders the historical moment.

In the following review, Annan discusses the amount of detail Fitzgerald manages to put into The Blue Flower.

In the following review, Herzog asserts that the spareness of Fitzgerald’s style and her ability to capture setting in The Blue Flower create a powerful effect on the reader.

In the following review, Dirda recounts the virtues of Fitzgerald’s Blue Flower.

In the following review, Eder praises Fitzgerald’s deft use of details to evoke a sense of possibilities in her Gate of Angels.

In the following review, Eder describes the mosaic quality of Fitzgerald’s writing in The Blue Flower.

In the following review, Wheeler states that the central paradox of Fitzgerald’s Human Voices is between human truth and the lies of war.

In the following review, Gardam praises Fitzgerald’s ability to draw a convincing setting and set of characters in The Blue Flower.

In the following review, Ratcliffe complains that while Fitzgerald has provided a well-drawn setting and several memorable characters, she has not given all of her heart to The Blue Flower.

In the following review, Knapp delineates the positive and negative features of Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.

[Penelope Fitzgerald's] Human Voices is about the BBC in the summer and autumn of 1940, when French troops camped in London parks, the Concert Hall in Broadcasting House was turned into a dormitory and the Blitz started. But anyone who has read her earlier novels, The Bookshop and Offshore … will know that the matter may be important but the manner is even more so. She is an individual, witty and trusting writer—trusting because she assumes that readers are as alert as she is. The tone ...

In the following excerpt, Pritchard lauds Fitzgerald’s Gate of Angels as a “delightful entertainment.”

Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop is on any reckoning a marvellously piercing fiction. It is (of course) about a woman's resilience under stress. And the duress Florence Green is put under when she opens a bookshop in an islanded Suffolk seaside place is all the more harrowing because of its neighbourly, gossipy ordinariness, its roots in the well-intentioned but rival cultural aspirations of the genteel Mrs Gamart, the General's wife. What happens is sharply localized. [There] are the...

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 and understatement. It is a very English kind of writing, backing away from emotional and stylistic excess; if one had to suggest a literary antithesis I suppose it would be Lawrence Durrell. For my part, give me Mrs Fitzgerald every time…. Penelope Fitzgerald brings off her effects through neat dialogue and a deft hand with the descripti...

In the following excerpt, Flower states that The Bookshop is “clearly one of [Fitzgerald’s best.”]

[Penelope] Fitzgerald's new book, Human Voices, is about the BBC in the early days of the war…. She attempts to be exact; she offers authorial summings-up and judgments; but she guarantees nothing, neither justice, happiness, nor even an end to all the stories she imparts to us…. Penelope Fitzgerald's precise prose and brief comic set-pieces have some relation to the more flamboyant and apparently merciless proceedings of both Muriel Spark and Fay Weldon, but she lacks both their...

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 about his mortgage and his absentee wife, and an assortment of absurdities, excesses and enthusiasms which variously constitute and congeal into characters. There are traces throughout The Golden Child of a mildly sinister comedy about 'the pride and bitter jealousy which is the poetry of museum-keeping', where pointed references to...

[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 exhibit in her shop. Against this background she draws some splendidly English eccentrics of all ages, from 11-year-old Christine, who helps in the shop after school, to the oldest inhabitant, Mr Brundish, who dies in the attempt to defend Florence's rights. There is also a poltergeist or 'rapper', but its antics do not m...