PENELOPE FITZGERALD delighted perhaps a wider range of readers than any novelist of her time. She was admired and enjoyed by every novel reader, but also by people who generally never read a novel at all. The power of her mind immediately made itself felt, but it was not felt as an intrusion. Her standards of scholarship, of style, "proper words in proper places", were of the highest: yet her sympathies were, obviously and compassionately, with the unfortunate, the inadequate, the disregarded. She possessed an extraordinary transparency, disdaining the desire to force assent to her own strong...
