Fitzgerald's first novel, The Golden Child (1977), which was written to divert her husband during his last illness, took the form of the classic detective story. It was inspired by the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum, as Human Voices (1980) was based on her war years in the BBC, and At Freddie's (1982) on her experiences at the Italia Conti stage school, where she taught in the l960s. The Bookshop (1978) recalls her years of living in Southwold, where she herself worked in a bookshop, and Offshore was based on her family's life on a rat-ridden barge at Battersea - which sank twice. This is one reason the tag of ‘historical novel’, often attached to the final books, is inadequate. They aren’t ‘set’ in ‘periods’ so much as inhabited or even haunted by other works. In Innocence (1986), the highlight is the astonishingly precise and sympathetic portrait of Antonio Gramsci, dying in a Roman prison. Tolstoy himself does not appear in The Beginnings of Spring (1988), but his legacy does, in several variations, comic, beautiful, menacing. Her last novel, The Blue Flower (1995), recounts scenes from the youth of Novalis, and so, the everyday life-world of the German Romantics. So I Have Thought of You, the title of her selected letters, is, in a way, typical Fitzgerald: it looks so cosy and mumsy but it isn’t. It’s from ‘Gute Nacht’ by Wilhelm Müller, as set to music in Schubert’s Winterreise, as forlorn and desolate a lyric as they come. This was one of those books that slowly crept up on me, caught hold and didn't let go. I grew to care about these people--and, silly me, even about their boats. Everyone and everything in this story is living on the edge--of a relationship, of the land or the water, of reality, of childhood or adulthood, of wealth or abject poverty, of physical destruction. A book that's hard to describe...I'm very glad I read it. In summer 1940 she fell in love with Desmond Fitzgerald, a ‘dashing … tall, dark and handsome’ trainee barrister and lieutenant in the Irish Guards. The couple married in 1942 and settled, after Desmond’s war service (for which he was awarded the Military Cross), in London. Their first child, a boy called Valpy, was born in 1947 and the year after they moved into a cottage in Hampstead, ‘an appealing couple in their early thirties’ living in a ‘shabby-smart bohemian environment which suited them – or suited Penelope – very well’. Much of '' Offshore'' simply sets the scene and arranges the characters, tasks Ms. Fitzgerald accomplishes with style. The setting is the Battersea Reach of the Thames, the cast a group of gentle eccentrics

Five years later, At Freddie’s, with its horrible final image of the stage-school pupil ‘climbing and jumping, again and again and again’, was the last Fitzgerald novel drawn from autobiographical experience. A third biography, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984), became what Lee calls ‘the crucial turning point’– two others, on L.P. Hartley and the Poetry Bookshop of Harold Monro, were abandoned – after which came the four late novels, their settings derived almost entirely from book-research, plus imagination and dream. Knowledgeable readers can trace Moravia, Pavese and De Sica in Innocence. Fitzgerald herself listed Baedeker’s 1914 guide to Russia and memoirs from British expats as sources for The Beginning of Spring (including the awful story about the drunken bear). She started, and abandoned, a book about the Inklings (she had attended Tolkien’s lectures when she was at Oxford, and considered him ‘odious’), transposing the focus to Cambridge as her uncle Dilly would have known it: thus The Gate of Angels. Then, in the early 1990s, she settled down for ‘about three years’, to read everything she could by and about Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), the Saxon nobleman and salt-mine manager who, three years before his death at 29, began publishing under the name Novalis, and whose hallucinatory Heinrich von Ofterdingen– chosen by Borges to be read to him on his deathbed – introduced the idea of the ‘blue flower’ to German Romanticism, as the emblem of the impossible and irresistible search.

Chelsea Boats today

Offshore is a 1979 novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. Her third novel, it won the Booker Prize in the same year. The book explores the emotional restlessness of houseboat dwellers who live neither fully on the water nor fully on the land. It was inspired by the most difficult years of Fitzgerald's own life, years during which she lived on an old Thames sailing barge moored at Battersea Reach. The book is the struggle--the pull of the river vs the cry of others on the land to move away from the water; giving up the dream (or dreaming) for the adult world (reality perhaps). It wasn't clear to me until later in the book that this book was likely set in the late 1960s, which also made the seeming squalor on the river all the more real. Britain was so badly damaged by the war and that war is still referred to here. Now there was the fairytale of the flower children going on:

This affectionately humorous tone is predominant throughout the novel. The author maintains an amused distance from her characters, but is clearly on their side. Alan Hollinghurst's introduction explains that the book is set in the early 1960s, although when characters venture out to the King's Road, it becomes a blended, dreamlike version of the whole 60s in which preteens are excited to buy cheap Woolworths cover versions Cliff Richard records, while hippie boutiques waft incense. There are little details about the era otherwise rarely heard, like the late opening times of the fashionable shops:Lee stays close to the evidence, and is wary of speculation. But it’s hard not to see the story of Fitzgerald’s life—at least, until its improbable late renaissance—as painfully symptomatic of its period and nation, a self half-maimed by familial emotional reticence, unhappy boarding schools (Fitzgerald was sent away at the age of eight, and hated her schools), male privilege, the religious self-mortification of leftover Victorian evangelicalism, the devastations of two world wars, and a distinctively English postwar parsimoniousness. The waiter invited them to choose between coq au vin and navarin of lamb, either of which, in other circumstances, would have been called stew."

Since Fitzgerald lived there the boats are no longer restricted to flushing their toilets on a falling tide, and residents and visitors no longer need to clamber from one boat to another. But the boat owners are in protracted disputes with the owners of the moorings who are apparently seeking more expensive boats paying higher fees, and the owners of older and smaller boats fear being pushed off. On the impact of the win on Penelope Fitzgerald, the article states: Hillary Spurling also said the widespread incredulity that greeted this unexpected triumph caused Fitzgerald "pain … and humiliation ever after". The author was probably all too aware that this wasn't the best book on the shortlist – or even her best. It's perhaps also the reason her later, far better historical novels didn't even get a look-in for the prize. Injustice all round. The novel's epigraph, "che mena il vento, e che batte la pioggia, e che s'incontran con si aspre lingue" ("whom the wind drives, and whom the rain beats, and those who clash with such bitter tongues") comes from Canto XI of Dante's Inferno.Once, I embarked on a project to read all the Man Booker Prize winners, and didn't get very far. I started at the beginning and started making assumptions, like all Booker Prize winners are about the empire. It is books like this (winner, 1979) and Hotel du Lac (winner, 1984) that prove me wrong. And since I've read them closely together I can see some similarities - a cast of characters in a specific place that dictates (or allows for) some of the behavior. Richard was the kind of man who has two clean handkerchiefs on him at half past three in the morning." She was educated at Wycombe Abbey, an independent girls' boarding school, and Somerville College, Oxford University, where she graduated in 1938 with a congratulatory First, being named a "Woman of the Year" in Isis, the student newspaper. [1] She worked for the BBC in the Second World War. In 1942 she married Desmond Fitzgerald, whom she had met in 1940 at Oxford. He had been studying for the bar and enlisted as a soldier in the Irish Guards. Six months later, Desmond's regiment was sent to North Africa. He won the Military Cross in the Western Desert Campaign in Libya, but returned to civilian life an alcoholic. [1]