Penelope Fitzgerald

Zusatztext

<p><b>Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography 2014</b> <b>Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography</b> <b><i>New York Times Book Reviews</i>10 Best Books of the Year</b></p><p>Penelope Fitzgerald (19162000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel<i>Offshore</i>in 1979, and her last work,<i>The Blue Flower</i>, was acclaimed as a work of genius. The early novels drew on her own experiences a boat on the Thames in the 1960s; the BBC in war time; a failing bookshop in Suffolk; an eccentric stage-school. The later ones opened out to encompass historical worlds which, magically, she seemed to possess entirely: Russia before the Revolution; post-war Italy; Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis.</p><p>Fitzgeralds life is as various and as cryptic as her fiction. It spans most of the twentieth century, and moves from a Bishops Palace to a sinking barge, from a demanding intellectual family to hardship and poverty, from a life of teaching and obscurity to a blaze of renown. She was first published at sixty and became famous at eighty. This is a story of lateness, patience and persistence: a private form of heroism.</p><p>Loved and admired, and increasingly recognised as one of the outstanding novelists of her time, she remains, also, mysterious and intriguing. She liked to mislead people with a good imitation of an absent-minded old lady, but under that scatty front were a steel-sharp brain and an imagination of wonderful reach. This brilliant account by a biographer whom Fitzgerald herself admired pursues her life, her writing, and her secret self, with fascinated interest.</p>

Autorenportrait

Hermione Lee is a biographer, critic, and teacher of literature. Her previous books include the internationally acclaimed biography,<i>Virginia Woolf</i>('One of the most impressive biographies of the decade: moving, eloquent, powerful',<i>Financial Times</i>) and<i>Edith Wharton</i>('A feat of exhaustive research... a glorious biography',<i>Independent on Sunday</i>), as well as books on Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Philip Roth. Her collection of essays on life-writing,<i>Body Parts</i>, was published in 2005, and her<i>Biography: A Very Short Introduction</i>in 2009. She is the President of Wolfson College Oxford. In 2013 she was made a Dame for services to Literary Scholarship. She lives in Oxford and Yorkshire.

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