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, which is Britain's most valuable literary award, worth £10,000 to the winner. She won the Booker Prize in 1980 with her third novel, Offshore (1979). Her writing couples a traditionally moral humanist approach with a supple, spare style; her novels are short, but not slight.

Fitzgerald sees herself as an encouragement to late starters--she was sixty-one when her first novel, The Golden Child (1977), was published. Born in Lincoln, England, in 1916, to Edmund Valpy and Christina Hicks Knox, she grew up in a literary environment--her father was the editor of Punch magazine, and her uncle, Ronald Knox, was a translator of the Bible and a writer of detective stories. She has written a biography of all four Knox brothers (1977), and feels that the...