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"Fitzgerald, Penelope"
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Penelope Fitzgerald : a life
English writer \"Fitzgerald, born into an accomplished intellectual family, the granddaughter of two bishops, led a life marked by dramatic twists of fate, moving from a bishop's palace to a sinking houseboat to a last, late blaze of renown. We see Fitzgerald's very English childhood in the village of Hampstead; her Oxford years, when she was known as the 'blonde bombshell'; her impoverished adulthood as a struggling wife, mother, and schoolteacher, raising a family in difficult circumstances; and the long-delayed start to her literary career\"--Amazon.com.
Book
“Apotheosis of Poesy”: The blue flower as a Romantic theory of the novel
Penelope Fitzgerald’s The blue flower re-engages with Early German Romantic literary theory and develops her Romantic theory of the novel by fictionalizing Novalis’s formation as a poet. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, core members of Frühromantik (also Jena Romanticism), conceive Romantic poetry as poiesis, as aesthetic production of any art form. A Romantic theory of the novel must be immanent in the production of the novel. Fitzgerald’s advancement of the Romantic narrative theory harnesses the productive energy of the oscillation between the incomplete tendency of the fragments and the totalizing energy of pursuing the absolute. This tension between fragments and completion runs through the three stages of this study. Firstly, Fitzgerald figures the artist as the creative subject in her innovative combination of the Künstlerroman and the biographical novel to totalize the Romantic fragments. Secondly, she develops a narrative theory by restructuring the temporal structures of irony and allegory. Finally, she re-articulates Novalis’s pursuit of the philosophy of a universal language as Romantic poetry. Through a dialectic of the narrative content and form, she advances the Jena Romantic ideal of the novel as a theory of the novel.
Journal Article
Omissions are not Accidents
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in a 1919 letter that his work 'consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part which is the important one.' In Omissions Are Not Accidents , Christopher J. Knight analyzes the widespread apophaticism in texts from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. In theology, apophaticism refers to the idea that what we cannot say about God is more fundamental than what we can; in literature and other works of art, Knight argues, it functions as a way of continuing to speak and write even in the face of the unspeakable.
Probing the works of authors and intellectuals from Henry James to Jacques Derrida, Knight suggests that we no longer trust ourselves to speak about experience's most numinous aspect, and explores the consequences of the modern artist's tendency to imagine his or her work as incomplete. Ambitious in the scope of its investigation, Omissions Are Not Accidents lends insight into an important modern phenomenon.
eBook
The bookshop
A free-spirited widow risks everything to open a bookshop in a conservative 1950s English town, spurring a surprising cultural awakening while making some polite but ruthless enemies.
Streaming Video
The bookshop
England 1959. In a small East Anglian town, Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop.
Streaming Video
The prudence of Penelope Fitzgerald
After university, she established herself as a literary journalist, wrote for the TLS and Punch (whose editor was her father, E.V. Knox), worked at the bbc during the war, and with her husband Desmond, a barrister, edited a magazine called World Review. The distinction Fitzgerald draws between fiction and biography is illuminating: \"On the whole, I think, you should write biographies of those you admire and respect,\" she said, \"and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.\" Any reader of Fitzgerald's historical novels, with their precise evocations of vanished times in cultures remote from her own, is bound to wonder how she could know so much about, say, the life of a commercial printer in prerevolutionary Russia or intellectual controversies in eighteenthcentury Germany. [...]the books, as the novelist Julian Barnes puts it, \"feel like novels which just happen to be set in history, and which we enter on equal terms with the characters we find within them.\"
Trade Publication Article
Fitzgerald, Penelope (1916–2000)
(1916–2000),
only daughter of the essayist and humorist E. V. Knox. She was born in Lincoln and
Reference
Our Village, Our Shelves; From England, a Quiet But Powerful Work
\"The Bookshop\" is a deceptively quiet novel. Set in 1959 and 1960 in the dreary little East Suffolk coastal village of Hardborough, it is the story of an unprepossessing widow of a certain age, Florence Green, who decides to open a bookstore with her late husband's small legacy. One could scarcely imagine a bare plot less likely to yield drama or interest, yet (Penelope) Fitzgerald locates in it rich and surprising stuff. This is because a bookstore in Hardborough is almost literally unthinkable. The town is on hard times: \"The herring catch had dwindled, naval recruitment was down, and there were many retired persons living on a fixed income.\" Hardborough is \"an island between sea and river, muttering and drawing into itself as soon as it felt the cold,\" with the result that it is both isolated -- except in warm weather, when vacationers arrive to bask and swim -- and inward: \"Everybody in the town knew when there were likely to be vacant premises, who was in financial straits, who would need larger family accommodation in nine months, and who was about to die.\" Chief among the latter is Mrs. Violet Gamart, wife of a prominent if rather dotty local figure and otherwise connected to other men of influence broader in import than the town limits of Hardborough. Mrs. Gamart believes that Hardborough needs an arts center and that the Old House is the right place for it. She sets in motion a chain of events aimed at bringing about that end, one that is unwittingly abetted by Mrs. Green herself.
Newspaper Article
Petals On the Wind
PENELOPE FITZGERALD brought out her first novel in 1977, when she was past 60; in the two decades since then her books have appeared regularly every other year or so; three titles -- The Bookshop (1978), The Beginning of Spring (1988) and The Gate of Angels (1990) -- made the shortlist for Britain's distinguished Booker Prize, and Offshore (1979) took home the award. Many readers felt that at least one of her other books, Innocence (1986), was as good as or even better than these four. When The Blue Flower came out in England in 1995 it was chosen as \"the book of the year\" more often than any other by a score of distinguished writers and reviewers. In fact, Fitzgerald's public admirers range from novelist A.S. Byatt (\"How does she do it?\") to the eminent scholar Frank Kermode. On these shores Richard Eder, book critic of the Los Angeles Times, has called her \"the best English writer who is at present at the prime of her power.\" That phrase may be a little awkward, but there's no mistaking the enthusiasm. Doubtless our American publishers prefer to distribute only the truly timeless in hardcover, and a perfect work of art such as this one must naturally bow before the obvious superiority of the latest \"Star Trek\" tie-in. Perhaps, though, Mariner Books -- a new division of Houghton Mifflin -- hopes that a paperback edition may encourage readers, especially younger readers, to give Fitzgerald a whirl. Whatever the case, The Blue Flower is a bargain, a book to buy and salt away for vacation or to turn to gratefully at the end of a soul-destroying Washington workday. Die blaue Blume, the blue flower -- first imagined by the great German poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis -- has long been a symbol of Romantic yearning, whether for easeful death or for some ineffable and transcendental ecstasy. In her novel Fitzgerald follows the general course of Hardenberg's early life, providing cameos of his family, teachers, friends and employers. Even though there are 55 chapters (for a mere 225 pages) and nearly as many characters, the book never feels busy or hurried. Each character springs to life in a few sentences or a crisp turn of phrase. \"Large though the house was, she always found guests a difficulty. The bell rang, you heard the servants crossing the hall, everything was on top of you before you could pray for guidance.\" And so you have Fritz's timid, always slightly bewildered mother, the Freifrau.
Newspaper Article