LRB Selections: Penelope Fitzgerald

by Penelope Fitzgerald, Hermione Lee (Introduction)

Genres: Essays

148 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

Penelope Mary Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among "the ten best historical novels". A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."

Reviews

[Carlton · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent, if slim, collection in which the short entertaining essays seemingly effortlessly show incisiveness, interest, sympathy, research, diversity, and humour for the books reviewed. Most importantly, I now have a list of further books to consider reading, and renewed incentive to tackle Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Not all of the reviews are favourable, but when critical, such as the review of Whistling in the Dark: Memory and Culture in Wartime London, they can also be wonderfully humorous, as when the author (Freedman) comments on a radio comedy:
Handley went on the air as the mayor of Foaming-at-the-Mouth - a name ‘similar to many English villages’, Freedman explains”, and you know that she means the structure, but nevertheless Fitzgerald picks up on the unintentional humour.
The book also includes notes from the author and London Review of Books covers between many of the reviews, as was done with Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books (plus a short story and some humorous ditties).