The Gate of Angels

by Penelope Fitzgerald

In 1912, rational Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger - fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, generous working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications - not only of the heart but also of the head - as Fred and Daisy take up each other's education and turn each other's philosophies upside down.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, British Literature, Classics, Novels, 20th Century

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

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

[Violet wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know why it's taken me so long to discover Penelope Fitzgerald and Muriel Spark. Their books are wonderfully short, wonderfully intelligent and wonderfully funny. In other words, the ideal remedy when you're in a reading slump.

In The Gate of Angels two innocents meet through a cycling accident. Freddie is a junior fellow at the college of St Angelicus where no female has ever been allowed to set foot through the gate. Daisy has just lost her job as a trainee nurse in London and has come to seek work at a psychiatric hospital in Cambridge. It's 1912 and we all know what is about to happen in the world. (There's one subtle poignant reminder when two of the characters go to see Rupert Brooke in a theatre production.)

Like in Offshore Fitzgerald flits like a butterfly around her characters without ever quite settling on them for long. She's interested in their innocence and how that innocence will be hurt. And she's interested in the circumstantial as a means of understanding the roots. To call a novel charming can sometimes be a bit patronising but it's Fitzgerald's most effective weapon; it's the charm of a novelist who feels a deep infectious affection for her characters and applies a subtle wit and intelligence to every page. She also manages to effortlessly load the novel with the age's relevant themes - class barriers, the encroachment of women into men's hallowed territory, the looming discoveries of science.

It's perhaps something of a cliché to depict that generation exclusively in terms of innocence as Fitzgerald does here but the ending is super effective in making you wonder how the world went suddenly so insane. Freddie is about to attend a lecture by a physicist who has a German assistant and claims to have proof of the nuclear atom. Freddie's old-world professor, who only believes in the observable, jokes that next people will want to believe even the atom can be split. Suddenly we have all the horrors of the 20th century before us.
4+ stars.

[Fionnuala]

Of inner eyes and outer observations

Penelope Fitzgerald knows how to write stories full of odd and interesting details that we get to observe and then arrange to suit our own imaginations, our 'inner eye' if you like. She often ends her stories in a way that allows us to imagine the further story for ourselves, and make what seemed impossible possible—if we want to. We can choose to see a disaster happening after the last page, as I did in At Freddie's, although another reader might not imagine that same disaster at all. Or we can choose to see a plot turnaround, as I did in this book, though again, it wasn't 'written', and many of the facts, the 'observables' of the story, pointed to it being impossible.

'Impossibilities', or things that cannot exist, are a feature of this book although it is set in 1913 in a Cambridge College devoted exclusively to the study of things that do exist. One of the impossibilities in the story is that in St Angelicus College, (for that is the unlikely name of this 15th century college devoted to the sciences, called Angels for short) there's a locked gate in a side wall that is rumoured to open by itself at momentous moments in the college's history. It's as if the physical building that houses Angels has an extrasensory nerve, an inner eye, impossible to find if anyone would look for it, but which exists nevertheless and which is watching and waiting for an opportunity to intervene in the life of the college. Scientists would argue that such extra sensory nerves or inner eyes don't exist, not in people and certainly not in buildings, yet that inner eye/gate opens within the story to allow a resolution after the last page even though all the observables facts that the author has deliberately placed in the story point to such an outcome being impossible.

The 'observables' in this case consist of two people from radically different backgrounds who collide for a brief moment in time. Fred Fairly is a scientist and a Fellow at Angels. Daisy Saunders is an orphaned trainee nurse from south London who has lost her job and is more or less destitute. Fred and his friends in the College debating society, who are all from comfortable backgrounds, entertain themselves by discussing the mysteries of existence. One of the things they conclude is that all we can do has to be done by ourselves, and for ourselves, on this earth where we find ourselves placed.
Meanwhile, Daisy, with little education, and no family support, learned very early in her life what they've realised after years of debating: that anything that can be done must be done by herself, for herself, in the hard life she finds herself trapped in. For Daisy, the mysteries of existence are a luxury quite beyond her means. Her philosophy is simple: I don’t tell lies unless I’ve got to, any more than you run to catch a tram unless you’ve got to.

But in spite of knowing that no one will help her except herself, Daisy can't resist helping others (she's described as 'a ministering angel' at one point), and her generosity leads her into difficulties that only a lie will get her out of, though the lie inevitably leads to worse difficulties. And that's when Daisy's generosity takes her into a place that no woman has ever tread in history.

All that I can say further is that Penelope Fitzgerald makes great use of the elements she's chosen to use in this story, science, angels, observables, extra sensory nerves, practicalities, impossible mysteries. It's a fascinating mix. So fascinating that when I got to the end I turned back to the beginning and read the entire book again. It was magic.

[Karen· · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now who could resist Daisy Saunders? Obviously she looks the part of a true heroine, tall and slender but strong with a wealth of hair - ah, the symbolism of hair - and furthermore she is made of the right stuff: generous, frank and free in her opinions without being shameless or impertinent, pragmatic, witty, and intelligent. Irresistible. Fred cannot withstand her obvious charms for sure. Once Providence has thrown them together, he is smitten, he is felled, he is helplessly bewitched:

"Well, this is the second time we've ever met. We don't hardly know each other and we aren't anything to each other."
Fred was appalled."Don't you know what you are to me?" he asked.
Daisy considered. "I suppose I do know, Fred. To tell you the truth, a child of six would notice it."

Of course there is a catch, the course of true love and so on... Fred is Junior Fellow of an arcane fictional Cambridge college which forbids marrying and living out for one thing, and for another Daisy is not of the marriageable class. This is 1912, and the gulf between a girl from South London where Stockwell turns to Brixton, and a Junior Fellow from Blow Holt rectory (change at Bishop's Leaze) is as wide as the ocean and just as unbridgeable. No fear though. We know we are in a topsy-turvy (magical?) world where the willows have blown down and the cows are blundering about or lying on their backs:

A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason.

Sounds horribly like a historical romance doesn't it? I'm failing miserably to get the flavour here, because it is just the tastiest little morsel, quite, quite scrumptious. There are gentle side swipes at a the fusty academics:

In some colleges - King's for example - they talked all evening, but then King's was full of historians and philosophers, who had no need to relax. What else did they ever do?

Daisy is so winning not least because of all the assaults on her dignity and maidenhood she has to withstand; a nubile girl of her class is seen as fair game for every groper and wide boy and slobbering old lecher. She wins our hearts too with the good grace and wicked dry wit with which she counters insults and knocks, and because her biggest mistake is made out of a desire to help a soul in distress. There is the women's question: the campaign for women's suffrage is at its height, and women are done down at every turn. Mrs Wrayburn studied for four years at Newnham, but the university does not award degrees to women. There is a glimpse into the scary world of early 20th century medicine, still using leeches and the fierce unassailable authority of the gods in white, indulged in their every whim and craziness. Another theme is the power of story - a newspaper story that loses Daisy her job, a ghost story that forces the police to re-open a case... And over all of this there is more, there is more: the squeaky question of the unobservable. Can we only trust and believe what we can see? What role is there for the non-rational? There has to be a leap of faith for Ernest Rutherford to come up with the idea of atomic mass. Is this comparable with belief in a god above, or ghosts below? Perhaps a certain amount of mystery is necessary, or at the very least desirable in the world - Fred and Daisy's romance nearly comes to grief over a complete and total exposure of the truth about the accident that brought them together. It is only a magical, inexplicable event that can save them.........
Magical, there's that word again. There is something magical about Fitzgerald packing all of that into 218 pages. Delicious.

[Jan-Maat]

I was going to say that this was a love story, but then I remembered that only one of the protagonists is in love with the other. This is, I find, the more usual state of affairs. Also of course it is a Fitzgerald novel and nothing is as straightforward as it looks, the simple prose is dense with secrets that unfold in the imagination after reading. However this is a short, witty story possibly with a happy ending set in Cambridge and London at the beginning of the 20th century.

Cambridge and London are not to be understood as high falutin'. This is an archaic Cambridge with male only colleges with celibate staff at the birth of modern physics (this features in the story too) and a London, well like it is, dirty and raucous, where pretending to be something other than you are is a fact of life. Contrasted with another equally single minded institution - if one that is slightly less well fed - a London teaching hospital.

A pope poisoned from his favourite quince jelly, flesh eating ghosts, women's suffrage, the atheist inclinations of a Vicar's son, experimental physics at the beginning of the twentieth century it is all here.

[Jean-Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

As always with Penelope Fitzgerald, she gets the details just right--women's suffrage, the opening of the first Selfridge's department store, the fact that suicide was a prosecutable crime (if you survived) in the UK until 1961. But because this one was a little light on plot, it began to feel like nothing but a collection of details. Then again, science was never exactly my favorite subject.

Is there a rule that says don't immediately read a second book by author of the book you just finished and absolutely loved? There should be, and I should know it by now. But the beauty of it is that a weak work by a beloved author makes you reconsider and appreciate other works by that author which you had previously considered to be their weakest.

[Paul Sánchez Keighley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just perfect. What a beautiful, beautiful book.

On the surface, this is a tale of forbidden love that takes place in the fictional Cambridge college of St Angelicus in the early 20th century. The story is fittingly framed between two historical events: antipope Benedict XIII’s role in the Papal Schism of 1378, and Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of the nuclear atom in 1911.

Instead of mostly relying on symbols like in The Bookshop , here Fitzgerald pads the story out with the exploration of several themes, the two main overarching ones being the limits of science in human experience (perhaps best encapsulated by Hamlet’s ‘There are more things in heaven and earth...’) and the entry of women into worlds theretofore exclusive to men (heavily symbolised by a specific event at the end of the book).

These themes are further milked through recurrent sub-themes, such as the academic mind vs the streetwise mind, women as free individuals vs women as housewives, etc.

The early suffragettes and the problems faced by women in the workplace, when forced to interact with men who still don’t see them as equals, are subjects dealt with subtly but with a sting. Seedy at times, but never pathetic.

Fitzgerald’s mastery of language and specialised lingoes makes the experience all the more pleasant. One moment she’s telling a chilling ghost story, the next a physics lecture as far up its own arse as to be convincingly academic. One part recounts the routine of a London nurse, with detailed lists of the medicines and apothecary trinkets involved, then another deals with matters of the law written in legalese so convincing it makes you feel your wallet tighten.

All this could only be made possible with hours on end of patient, prudent and passionate historical research. I often found myself wondering where she learnt all these titbits and sort of wished for a bibliography at the end.

I could go on. I’ll wrap it up by sharing the first paragraph, which has to be one of the best openings to a book I’ve read in the past year:

How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up Mill Road past the cemetery and the workhouse. On the open ground to the left the willow-trees had been blown, driven and cracked until their branches gave way and lay about the drenched grass, jerking convulsively and trailing cataracts of twigs. The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery weeping leaves which were suddenly, quite contrary to all their experience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festooned with willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, they tripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching. A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe it’s because George Gissing’s The Odd Women was my prior read that I found similarities between it and this ‘historical’ fiction of Fitzgerald’s. Set a bit later than the former, it carries the same theme of the ‘woman question,’ though it wears it lighter.

Every woman in the story has a money and/or ‘power’ issue: the young female protagonist is alone in the world, trying to educate herself while working her way up from poverty; an academic’s wife who went to Newnham, the women’s section of Cambridge (the setting of the novel), now deals with the dirty dishes of marriage; a ‘throwaway’ character near the end, a farmer’s wife, has had enough, at least for one night. Only the first woman is a focus of the novel, but the predicaments of the others jumped out at me as well.

With a particular comfortable familial setting and the interplay among the male protagonist’s sisters and mother, I was reminded of The Blue Flower (another of Fitzgerald’s ‘historical’ fiction), yet the two books are very different. And if you were put off Fitzgerald because you found The Bookshop or Offshore too depressing, you might want to try this one. It’s witty and charming, even fun. But, as with all the Fitzgerald works I’ve read, the surface holds depths. Be careful of that culvert.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are parts of this book that jump through the narrative at the speed of a bullet - which indicates to me that the writer was getting through "stuff" i.e. plot, to get on to, from her perspective at least, the More Interesting Elements. This I think, boils down to the character of Daisy and how given her extreme poverty, she never succumbs to self-pity, or gloom.

The book is divided into four parts - which deal logically with the two main characters, Fred, then Daisy, - then complications, and the final part is resolution - sort of. I enjoyed the first part; it's all about Fred Fairly, Junior Fellow at St. Angelicus, Cambridge. This section is written in sheer exuberance - with a grand send up of all those fuddy-duddy professor types and the celibates in the "cloisters" of St. Angelicus - no it's not a monastery, but it might as well be - no women are permitted - ever.

...Angels... was the smallest college in Cambridge, and had never shown any signs of wanting to extend or expand in any direction. It had been built, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, on a plan as unlike a monastery as possible. Although everything was in miniature, it resembled a fortress, a toy fortress, but a toy of enormous strength, with walls 31/2 feet thick, built without rubble ... There was no room in the court for [the students] bicycles, which had to remain stacked outside the Great Gate. Over the gate the heraldic arms, weathered almost flat with the wall, showed two angels asleep, waiting for the Day of Judgment ... The motto, Estoy in mis trece, not altogether suitable for a place of learning, was one of Benedict's few recorded remarks. It is translated as 'I have not changed my mind', but 'nothing doing' might be nearer.

There is a serious side, however, to this mocking of what the learned professors do, which as far as I can see - is absolutely nothing.

'I shan't go to hear them,' said Professor Flowerdew, 'but I shall be grateful if you could take complete notes, which I do not think will be distributed in a type or printed form at that lecture.
Rutherford has proposed a nuclear atom ...[he] claims to be able to show that it exists, that this unobservable, consisting of unobservables, depending on exchanges of energy of which he can only say that he has no idea when or why they may take place, exists, and that we must take it to be the indivisible unit of matter.'

Fred wanted to be alone, but he said, 'You ought to come, Professor.'
'No Fairly, I might disgrace myself. I might ask, "How can the unobservable be indivisible?" or indeed, divisible, for that too, I daresay, will soon be proposed.'

The above is a reference to the work of Ernest Rutherford who decamped to The University of Manchester - where he is still honored as the "father" of modern-day Nuclear Physics. It is an oblique aside, on the future scientific "Work" of splitting the atom!

This Cambridge work is presented in strong contrast to the hard, physical and emotional work that Daisy does - to survive. Her first work as a cleric - twelve hour days. Her second job as a trainee nurse at Blackfriars hospital - all day and all night too, sometimes with no break between and a half-day off, once a week. Her third, at Dr. Sage's private clinic in Cambridge 8.30 to 6.30; then she comes home and keeps house for Mrs Wrayburn. She is given a room in the attic for her unpaid help.

Daisy's background and hard beginnings make up the bulk of the second section and this was markedly less entertaining than the first, about Fred and the Cambridge Dons - but intentionally so.

There is the strangest of stories in the third part - told by Dr Matthews - a ghost story, which connects with Daisy and Fred's initial meeting. There is a crash of bicycles and horse cart on the road outside the Turner's farm, and Daisy and Fred are carried away to the Wrayburn's house for treatment - but the spot has a strange history. A man, crushed and rolled is buried there by a posse of nuns, whom one of Dr Matthews colleagues could hear - chanting in the night "in, in, in, and under, under" - they are struggling to push his body, who's legs are still moving under the road, which has been built up a little from the fensland. The two historians are at this location some 40 years earlier, working on an archeological dig. But the man who has been "crushed and elongated" - belongs to a past of several hundred years.

This Ghost Story doesn't really surprise. This is my third Fitzgerald, and one of her hallmarks is an element of the supernatural. What I can't really work out is the purpose - except possibly as a rather evil overshadowing of the Romance between Daisy and Fred.

And now - the title - The Gate of Angels - naturally, early on in the story, we are introduced to it - a very narrow gate that is never opened - the only other entrance to St. Angelicus, which as one of the scholars observes was built as a fortress, and not as a building to provide entrance to anyone. In the last section, where Daisy is destitute once again - she hears a cry - and enters through this narrow passage. Driven by instinct she knows someone needs her help - she's a nurse. The Master of St. Angelicus has experienced a syncope, otherwise known as a vasovagal - very unpleasant. I've experienced it myself - your heart slows to a terrible boom ... ... ... ... boom, and you feel extreme nausea. The simple and immediate solution is to lower the head below the heart or simply lay the person down - which is what Daisy does. The old man revives, and Daisy leaves through - The Gate of Angels.

Now this is where Ms Fitzgerald has become rather clever - Daisy is the ministering Angel. She possesses divine qualities - healing qualities which are spurned and overlooked by all around her. Surely the work that Daisy does - is the most significant in the whole of Cambridge - she heals, and passes easily through the door - which has only once before in its entire history stood open.

The famous parable - 'It is more difficult for a rich man (read any man) to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.' Daisy passes as easily as a sylph through that narrow gate.

Fitzgerald's character Daisy - demonstrates for us a well-known predicament. She represents high moral value and purity of heart which is contrasted severely with her status as woman, of low class, and how she is treated in our modern world.

Fred on the other hand represents - the man of science, who no longer requires faith in anything other than what his senses provide. The literal clash/crash that happens between these two, is present in all great novels. And this is where the Ghost Story hangs as an eerie, mangled hand over the Love Story. Will the forces for good triumph over the evil? Will Daisy unite with Fred, and dampen, at least temporarily - those raving spirits in the underworld?

[Paul Secor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Penelope Fitzgerald created quite a world within 160 pages: a possible couple - Fred, a naïf who's in the process of discovering himself, and Daisy, a self assured young woman, who on the one hand, is street smart, and on the other hand, is vulnerable to anyone who seems to need help; a scoundrel, who is determined that if he can't have Daisy, no one else can either; a group of scientists who are almost the scientific equivalent of Keystone Cops in early films; an academic who narrates a wildly entertaining ghost/horror story, which purports to be the solution to a crime; male academics who, when a woman inadvertently enters their enclave, can only cry out and wail helplessly; and an Edwardian British society that is showing cracks and is about to split open.

After all of this, The Gate of Angels is essentially a love story. I probably should say that it's a sort of love story with an open ending that readers can take wherever they want it to go.
All I'll say is that I wanted the ending to be a beginning.

"The bushes, too, were motionless, but from the crowded stalks and the dense hedges there came a perpetual furtive humming, whining and rustling which suggested an alarming amount of activity out of sight. Twigs snapped and dropped from above, sticky threads drifted across from nowhere, there seemed to be something like an assassination, on a small scale, taking place in the tranquil heart of summer."
This is a wonderful bit of writing on its own. Within the context of the novel, it's a foreshadowing of
personal and societal upheavals.

"Fred asked Daisy whether in spite of their short acquaintance he might call her Daisy and whether she would like to come out for a walk, a walk in the country. She said it would be the very thing. What about (Fred asked) taking the train to Whittlesford and walking from there to the mill at Great Chishill, only they wouldn't, probably, get so far. Daisy said she was game." (Reviewer's note - Daisy sounds like a prize.)

"Fred sighed. Was it one of the differences between men and women, that women like to live on their imagination? It's all they can afford, most of them, said Daisy."

"'How does it lie, Daisy?'
'Well, this is the second time we've ever met. We don't hardly know each other and we aren't anything to each other.'
Fred was appalled. 'Don't you know what you are to me?' he asked.
Daisy considered. 'I suppose I do know, Fred. To tell you the truth, a child of six would notice it.'"

"Taking tea at the hostel after Fred had gone back to his lab and Daisy to her duties, Mrs. Fairly returned to what Julia had said, 'or rather to the way you put it, Julia. A vacancy! Surely Fred can't even for a moment be thinking of leaving St Angelicus. And as to the girl herself -'
'Well, what about the girl herself?' Hester asked.
'You know I'm no respector of persons, but can you imagine her in the parish?'
'I don't have to imagine her in the parish,' said Hester. 'I can imagine her selling Votes for Women.'"

I bow to the wizardry of Penelope Fitzgerald. She managed to create a world in the space of what is essentially a novella. Such imagination! Perhaps, as Daisy said, imagination is what she could afford.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Revisited for the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.

Fred Fairley is the son of a country rector, a junior Natural Sciences fellow at a small, fictional Cambridge College – St Angelicus. His life is disrupted when he and a girl he had not previously met – Daisy Saunders – are knocked out after their bikes collide with an unlit farm cart, and the two of them are temporarily placed in the same bed to recover (on the mistaken belief that they are married) Fred immediately falls in love with her although the more experienced and world weary Daisy seems immune to her charms.

The story follows something of Fred and Daisy’s back story. Fred is the son of a country rector – he travels back home to tell his father he no longer believes in Christianity (in the absence of any form of scientific proof) but both he and his father are discomforted when Fred’s previously passive and predictable mother and sisters start to actively support the women’s vote movement. In Cambridge he also finds himself naturally drawn into the active debate between traditional and new science and between science and religion. Daisy, orphaned as a 17 year old in South London, gets work as a hospital ward assistant but loses he job when she tries (but fails) to help a patient by telling a journalist about his suicide attempt – she decides to go to Cambridge, accompanied by the persistent journalist to look for work with an eccentric Doctor who visits the London hospital but is based in Cambridge.

The book is written in Fitzgerald’s trademark style – deft characterization of individuals and also societies (the eccentricity of Cambridge academia and college life, the rigid hierarchy of a London hospital).

The book is really a tale of (partly unrequited) love while also exploring a variety of culture clashes in world on the verge of change (new versus traditional science, science versus religion, tradition versus progress, comfortable academia against the reality of South London working class life) but all in a very understated way. The story does drift in the second half, but is rescued by the open-ended conclusion.

[Jude · Rating 5 out of 5]

Within the last year i've developed the nasty habit of doing two things in bed i never had before: eating and watching television. i know. Disgusting to read, debilitating to experience - as these can only be called habits by the kindest or least caring minds and are in fact addictions of the first order. They do only harm and as the compulsion becomes and less manageable, so the satisfactions become more and more illusory.
If i were a dog or some other trainable entity, the idea would be to reward an alternative good behavior - preferably one that could be offered on the spot as a distraction from the bad behavior. Some schools would also encourage the use of an irresistible treat as well - to first distract the beast and then make the prospect of doing the good thing more compelling than continuing the bad one. etc.

Which brings us to Penelope Fitzgerald. My friends here at GR actually read on a regular basis. They are forever posting their exploits and my email is full of announcements. Indeed it is full of little else, since my life out of bed is cyclicly as empty, self-indulgent and deplorable as my recent habits in it. At any rate, last evening i picked up The Gate of Angels - which i had acquired shortly after reading Fitzgerald's Booker Prize-winning Offshore during my vacation in September. It is safe to say that for the duration of my engagement with what is so often referred to as a "slim little volume" that i am not really allowed to use the phrase but because i want to i will, i will be both distracted from and rewarded for my eschewing of both late night eating and television in bed.

This woman's prose and thought - the combination and shape of each - are so delightful that i don't really care what happens. Well of course that is not entirely true, it is simply that i already know i like what she does with a story and with characters and with place and with time and with setting, etc. I know i am guaranteed to have a good time and never feel that amusement is being had at the expense of profundity. I don't know enough about books or writing to say this without apologizing in case i'm foolish for doing so, but the only other writer whose every sentence is so laden with tone and revelation is Austen. Well - all that and humor - only Fitzgerald's is not the irony of distance and delight at hypocrisy, it is a compassionate and affectionate embrace. It is unblinking tenderness.

So we have here - or i do - joys more than equal to the addictions i so carelessly let steal my time and compromise my health. She has written 9 books and this is my second. I may make all the way through til spring.

[Fuchsia Groan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hay escritores con los que sencillamente no conectas. Tras haber leído dos de sus novelas, tengo bastante claro que esto es lo que me ocurre con Penelope Fitzgerald. Mientras leo tengo la sensación constante de que hay algo que no consigo captar, tengo presentes las opiniones de otros lectores, que la califican de inteligente, de divertida, alaban su uso de la ironía, y veo claramente que algo se me escapa, quizás la intención del relato, o el tipo de humor (aunque sí he encontrado aquí algún diálogo ingenioso). Hay, en definitiva, algo que no consigo descifrar, un mensaje que no me llega.

Tanto La librería como esta me han resultado totalmente intrascendentes, un conjunto de historias en principio interesantes, pero inconexas, demasiado ligeras, aunque no niego que puedan tener una profundidad que yo no veo. Y siento que no es justo que yo no sea capaz, aunque, como bien dice el narrador, a veces la justicia se reduce a lo que te permiten tus capacidades. Pues será eso.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Teach me to live that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed...'

As I was reading this remarkable novel (my second Fitzgerald trek after 'The Bookshop'), I was in awe of the author's distillation of a British history specific to the Cambridge area in the early 1900s. With meticulous vision, Fitzgerald vividly presents the rarefied world of academia (with its Doubting Thomas-myopia laced with fervent debate) and couples that with the stark realities lying in wait as traps for suspecting women. 

Re: the latter, the author zooms in on those abandoned (or under-appreciated) by men (or other women). We view that 'norm' through the eyes and experience of Daisy Saunders, a young woman of much-less-than-modest means but possessed of a fighting spirit:

'I've always been strong and healthy,' said Daisy, and beneath her put-on clothes she felt her physical self-respect extend and stretch itself, like a cat in the sun.

Daisy is someone it's very easy to root for. She knows just what to effectively say when placed in an exasperating spot... but she's still quite vulnerable. She is determined to better herself, and she attempts that through the nursing profession. It's a rigorous road. 

'En route', Daisy literally crashes into the life of researcher Fred Fairly, himself already a man strictly adhering to nothing but Reason... so much so that he is at the point of denying God. Yet fate seems to make complete sense to him, and he instinctively feels Daisy to be his fate:

I cannot live without Daisy, Fred thought. There is no God, no spiritual authority, no design, there are no causes and no effects--there is no purpose in the universe, but if there were, it could be shown that there was an intention, throughout recorded and unrecorded time, to give me Daisy.

Fitzgerald's deceptively slim narrative - short but quite packed - is not so much the stuff of rom-dram. The 'Romeo & Juliet' aspect of her story (with society itself standing in for the Houses of Montague and Capulet) actually feels of less importance to the author than her capture of atmosphere. 

And it's a rich atmosphere - in which what can be proven in life remains at odds with what cannot, and in which the dictates of the times slowly but inexorably shift, whether caused by human effort (i.e., the women's suffrage movement) or the influence of 'spirits' that challenge the nature of belief. Fitzgerald seems to suggest that humans can be in danger of being smug - and the ever-burgeoning truth is we're never as smart as we think we are. 

To his credit, Fred (eventually, with students) becomes more aware of this:

'... I asked you to devise a rational system of measuring human happiness. ... I [wanted] the opportunity of reminding you that there is no difference whatever between scientific thought and ordinary thought.'

Drawing from a variety of biographical facts and incidents within her own family, Fitzgerald has fashioned an evocative and charged portrait of time, place, character and human evolution. It's a winning combination. 

~ and the novel's final sentence can easily bring a lump to the throat.

[H.A. Leuschel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first book by this author and won't be the last for sure. There are elements of a love story, wonderful discussions about the philosophical body-mind problem and a host of eccentric and likable characters to engage with. A very enjoyable read!

[Will Ansbacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a bicycle accident, Fred Fairly wakes up beside an attractive young woman, Daisy Saunders, and promptly falls in love. Of course he does - it’s 1912 and Fred is a junior Fellow at a Cambridge college that doesn’t allow women even as servants or visitors, never mind as wives. Apart from his sisters, he doesn’t know any girls at all, as his life revolves around the Cavendish physics laboratory where he works, and his dilettante debating society friends. Daisy, however, is a resourceful girl – she has to be - no family at all, she’s from the poorest part of London, dismissed from her position as a probationary nurse because of an altruistic act, and pursued to Cambridge by a predatory newspaperman.

How Fitzgerald weaves these two contrasting lives together is an absolute delight, and all the better for being so short. Like Offshore, (which I thought was even better) it has the same light touch and cast of eccentric characters; and an ending for Fred and Daisy that is appropriately ambiguous.

Plus, there are Fitzgerald’s clever and wry observations on Edwardian society; one standout is a passage where Mrs Wrayburn (in whose house Fred and Daisy woke up) is staring down at a sinkful of lunch dishes; what follows is a hilarious page-long list of specialty dishware and cutlery that society deems necessary for a middle-class lunch.

Oh, and in addition, I can’t remember ever reading anything that so deftly brings in in a bunch of philosophical questions that perplexed the physics community in those years.

[Nick Grammos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time, Space, Love, Atomic Particles, Collide on a Dirt Road in Cambridge


Set in 1912 (dates are significant) around an obscure little male only college of Cambridge University. So male that celibacy is preferred for many of the staff, so small that there isn’t even a residence.

Scientific debates surface like faith in the senses that compels Fred to speak to his rector father that he has lost his faith. The atom is declared unreliable, but not because Einstein, but because one academic thinks it might fade.

This privileged world is punctured by Daisy, a girl from the south of London who runs into trouble with men and her values clash with her duties as a nurse when she tries to do good, though her working class poor background good is not the same as medical good. She ends up in Cambridge and an accident with a bicycle, a cart without lights and a runaway cyclist propels her into Fred’s love. Atoms still colliding randomly in space showing off their relevance.

Such eruptions seem trivial just before the war in two year’s time that will rupture all known ways of being. The foreboding is there – Rupert Brooke is playing Mephistopheles at the Marlowe Society theatre event. Young men taking their first year fail their first essays and wonder if their master is the right sort for them, little do they know how the social order will change them.

Though Rupert Brooke – who would be dead from septicaemia on his way to Gallipoli in 1915, buried on the Greek island of Skiros, performed in that play in 1907, not in 1912. What do we make of this cosmological anachronism? Is time variable or something. Perhaps to the old academics at Angelicus, the logic that an event can take place 5 years later may seem as logical as any spiritual mystical event – there’s a nice ghost story in there too – or attitudes as old as the 17thC candle holders that light the receptions rooms of the college.

Though, Fred and Daisy coming together reflects the broader transformation in the 20thC where such things are possible. The space time continuum is called into question. Fred is at the heart of change, his mother and sisters have turned the house into a busy hub of the suffragette battles. Daisy is a go-getter who may do very well in the world once the war is over.

This is a fun read, Fitzgerald has a lovely light touch whether in dialogue or the description of residency rooms. She brings people in and out of the story like a stage manager. She easily handles metaphysical questions alongside London street talk. I can imagine that the details she uses came across her desk when she worked in a bookshop. I can see her putting aside musty old books about colleges, physics, candelabra, British road law, suffragette memoirs rolling it all up into a gem of a story about the illogic of love.


**thanks to GR reader Fionnuala for her deep reading style introducing us to authors we wouldn't normally think of**

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a lovely, smart story with romantic and ghostly elements to satisfy a multitude of genres/readers. I hereby crown Penelope Fitzgerald with the "Royal Highness of Authors Who Know The Exact Moment to End a Story" award. I could list dozens of authors who could learn a lot by reading a few of her novels. And to all readers: Fitzgerald is a must!

[Lisa Hope · Rating 4 out of 5]

Penelope Fitzgerald wrote such rare small gems,and there just are not enough of them, so I spread them out. This time I chose The Gate of Angels, a novel set in turn of the century Cambridge. The plot is slender,a simple love story,but it is the comic backdrop of a pre-war Cambridge with its silly clubs, long worn out traditions and eccentric personalities that makes this book something to cherish. Fred Fairly's college is having a remarkably difficult time crossing the bridge from the 19th to the 20th century, no women are admitted on the premises, not even tabby cats, "but the starlings were more difficult to regulate." Throw into this mix a very literal working class girl on a bike...and magic happens. Maybe real magic. No one is real sure why some of the things happen that happen. Angels? Fun book, easy one long sitting or day and half broken up reading. The Gate of Angels was a perfect comfit of a story

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Fitzgerald's best novels - a novel that blends scientific ideas and an affectionate description of Cambridge with ghost stories and the wry humour that pervades all of her writing.

[Daisy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the space of 160 pages this book covers religion, women's suffrage, a court case, a hit-and-run cart crash and Rutherfordian physics which is some going and yet this books still manages to be thoughtful and measured.
We meet Fred Fairly a young man who straddles all the opposing forces that are competing in the Britain of 1912. Religion and science (his background being the former, his future the latter), male sanctuary and women's suffrage (he is a fellow at an all male Cambridge college while his mother and sister are active suffragettes), fatalism and self-determination, the theoretical and the physical.
Fred, like the zeitgeist, is unsure on which side he falls in these matters but on the matter of love his experience is as universal and unchanging as love has always been.
The object of his affection, Daisy, is the personification of his belief that one can only rely on oneself. A woman born into poverty there is much to be admired in the way she gets onto a highly competitive nursing course in an attempt to better herself and the way that she is completely self-sufficient and realistic in terms of her options. Having said all that, being young she is naïve and this leads her into sticky situations and the occasional necessary lie. As she tells Fred (I paraphrase here) 'You'd run for a tram, if you needed to but don't make a habit of it'. Daisy is the sticking point of the story for me, I felt as though I was meant to like her, to root for her and Fred to get together but I just didn't.
The dislike of my namesake did not detract from this slight novel which I felt gave a sympathetic and truthful representation of the big issues that affect us all and was a gorgeous read.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5) Ghosts (living and dead) and the mysterious forces that underpin who we are, and which lead us, if we're lucky, toward kindred spirits.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fred and Daisy are certainly a pair of star-cross'd lovers.......from their first encounter.....crashing into each other on their bicycles, their budding relationship seems doomed to be beset by misadventure and misunderstandings.

Fred is an academic who’s life is surrounded by books and men, his Cambridge college doesn’t allow women to enter its ancient halls, and its archaic rules forbids him to marry if he wants to remain one of its fellows.
His childhood as the son of a country Rector, has prepared him for his academic life, but not, perhaps, for the wider world.

Daisy’s upbringing in London has been very different.......she’s known poverty and making do, she does well as a student nurse, but her kindness and caring, along with a little naivety is her downfall, and she’s forced into finding a new life....that’s when she’s thrown into Fred’s path, and the story really begins.

This book is a kind of comedy of errors, but the comedy is subtle, witty and understated.....
It’s about a man totally unprepared for the shock of his falling in love, and a woman who is unprepared to be valued by such a man.


I loved this book, I loved Penelope Fitzgerald’s writing and characterisations, the look at life in Cambridge just before WWI changed it forever, the quirks and customs of college life, how the old and new beliefs and ideas sometimes clashed, and I really loved the surprising, uplifting ending....

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

This could easily have turned into a fairly silly 'positivist-scientist comes to see that there's at least one thing that he can't explain positivistically, viz., love' kind of tale, which I'd be fine with under other circumstances, but I expect more from Fitzgerald. And she delivers more, much more--emotionally compelling, intellectually riveting, and told with her usual cold, charming narrator's voice. But most importantly she avoids the romantic-comedy category by making it very clear that Fred's love for Daisy is nowhere near as important as the many, many other things in life that aren't susceptible to a 'scientific' analysis, such as, say, morality, mystery, and history.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason."

Penelope Fitzgerald was a famously late blooming author, being shortlisted for the Booker in 1978 for The Booskop [https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...] published when she was 60, winning it the next year for Offshore, and going on to be shortlisted 2 more times, in 1988 (for The Beginning of Spring) and finally in 1990 for this novel, which lost out to Byatt's Possession. Although she was overlooked for her most critically acclaimed novel, The Blue Flower [https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...] (1995).

Having spent much of the last month wading through too many over-long shortlisted titles from this year's Booker, it was pure pleasure to return to Fitzgerald's wonderfully compact prose. In 160 pages she manages to tell a (simple) story, create an evocative sense of historical place, introduce us to some memorably baffling characters and explore a number of powerful themes.

As with Beginning of Spring, it is set in the immediate pre WW1 period, which Fitzgerald has described elsewhere as “a time of very great hope of the coming of the 20th century, hopes of a New Life, a new world, the New Woman, a new relationship between the artist and the craftsman.” It was also a key period in the development of atomic physics, which forms both a background plot element (e.g. the rivalry between Cambridge's Cavendish lab and Rutherford and Geiger then in Manchester) as well as a key motif.

Indeed the story both starts and ends with a random collision between two "particles" - the main characters Fred Fairly, a Junior Fellow at the fictitious Cambridge college St Angelicus, and Daisy Saunders a poor, student nurse.

Atomic physics is also invoked as a model for religious faith, based at it is on "unobservables". Fitzgerald herself was religious, but Fairly isn't and is also exposed to the views of his employer Professor Flowerdew who sets out a very prescient (for a character in 1913, rather less so for author in 1990) critique of the future of atomic physics. From Ernest Mach (famous in reality for his 1897 statement "I don't believe that atoms exist!"), the fictional Flowerdew learned:

"the folly of basing any kind of scientific research on unobservables...in respect of the atom, Mach said to the world, don't commit yourself to it! An atom is not a reality, it is just a provisional idea.
...
Let me tell you what is going to happen, over the coming centuries, to atomic research.... They'll find that the models won't do, because they would only work if atoms really existed, so they'll replace them by mathematical terms which can be stretched to fit...there will be elementary particles which are too strange to have anything but curious names, and anti-matter which ought to be there but isn't."

Fairly believes, and tells his Vicar father, that he is "a man with a mind cleared and perpetually being recleared (because there was a constant need for that) of any idea that could not be tested through physical experience" and hence free of faith, but his, rather odd relationship, with Daisy challenges the foundations of his non-belief.

Fitzgerald is wonderful at the brief sketch:

On St Angelicus, also known as "Angels" and it's arcane rules:
"When James I said that a man should pray at Kings, eat at Trinity and study at Jesus, he added (on one occasion at least) 'and he should sleep in peace at Angels.
...
As on Mount Athos, no female animals capable of reproduction were allowed on the premises, although the starlings couldn't altogether be regulated. There were no women bedmakers or cleaners of any age."

Cambridge Lecturers who delight in impenetrability (and these still existed in the late 1980s in my experience):
"Could you read what [Professor Wilson] wrote on the blackboard?"
"Usually not. He used to write it with one hand and wipe it off at the same time with the other. But if I had the chance to study his methods..."

Nature:
"The bushes, too, were motionless, but from the crowded stalks and the dense hedges there came a perpetual furtive humming, whining and rustling which suggested an alarming amount of activity out of sight."

Against that, the novel suffers from, to the reader at least, oblique (at least to the reader) developments and characters, although ultimately that is a function of Fitzgerald's brevity and a part of her charm.

The clichéd critical description of Fitzgerald's novels is "polished gems" - and like most clichés, it is perfectly fitting.

Strongly recommended.

[Supriya · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more you read Fitzgerald the more her habits become apparent: class anxieties, differences between the interplay of intelligence and education - although I've never yet read a character of hers for whom either is mutually exclusive - a stylistic brevity that like Daisy Saunders, this novel's heroine, comes down to the fact that quarrelling is a luxury reserved for those who can afford the time. The construction of the novel as short story, with the big final OH SNAP moment coming in three lines, or even one, and working, not leaving the reader feeling cheated. And in fact leaving the reader ~*~dazzled~*~.

I think PF has been over this theme before, several times before, of how reason and belief do not interact. She flirts with mysticism which I can take or leave but her touch is so delicate that it's more likely to illuminate things her readers didn't consider before than to turn off lights that were always on. Moreover, this is such a great, great evocation of place: if anyone could make all-male early 20th century Cambridge feel so familiar, it would be her.

A word to the socially conscious: do not read this book in public if you care that fellow citizens will wonder at you for smiling and crying simultaneously: not at one or two points, but practically through this book. I'm so done with you Penelope. Don't be so fucking charming.

[Bandit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Continuing with my Penelope Fitzgerald retrospect and this one, sad to say, just really didn’t work for me. Wherein Bookshop was lovely and Offshore had its moments, Gate of Angels was…not for me. Set in 1912 in a college town this story was just too vague for me or maybe vague isn’t even a word, but (and this may be the best description I can do here) literally having read the book I can’t quite summarize it or even remember it all that much only two days later. Fitzgerald is a very good writer, her sentences have such elegance and her stories are always pleasantly economic in page counts and generous where in matters, but here only the individual sentences seemed to work, the sum total was a muddled mess of something resembling a comedy of affairs told in an inimitably British way. There was the main romance and much ado about college affairs, but that’s about it. Underwhelming at best. Though I seem to be in a minority, so don’t mind me. This book appears to have a very receptive and loving audience going by all the other GR reviews. But for me it kind of just wasted some time with nothing in return, barely any distraction, almost no amusement. At the very least it was quick, so I wasn’t stuck with a tedious reading chore. Wish I understood the appeal here. One off, probably, for an otherwise very talented author. Love that cover, though.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in 1912, Fred Fairley is a junior fellow at the St Angelicus College at Cambridge. He is a student of physics who has veered away from his Christian upbringing. When he and Daisy Saunders collide on their bicycles, he falls in love and contemplates the irrational emotional realm, which seems almost opposite to his scientific perspective. He returns home to visit his family, and finds his mother and sisters are now supporting women’s suffrage.

It speaks to a society on the verge of massive change, and I am sure it is no accident that it is set just before the onset of World War I. Upcoming changes include the rise of scientific explanations of the world, women’s suffrage, and the decreasing separation in social classes. It contains a number of literary allusions, and even an embedded ghost story! Fitzgerald covers a lot of ground in a short novel. I particularly enjoyed the subtle humor. It will appeal to those who enjoy quiet novels with interesting characters and societal insights.

[Jeanette · Rating 3 out of 5]

The usual brilliant hodgepodge that Penelope Fitzgerald develops from the inside of the characters outward. With all kinds of quirky describes and asides in the process, as well.

I just didn't grab on to this one as I did some of her others. But this young man and young woman in 1912 at the brink of so much change? So many angles of questions and circumstances that they both border.

Others speak of the happy ending. All I could posit of it was the Great War around the corner. I especially loved the physics allusions.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

For lovers of short books this packs a lot into its two hundred pages.
Cambridge University is well represented in literature as a last resort of male only mores and traditions. Fitzgerald writes a pastiche firmly in the mould of Evelyn Waugh and of Tom Sharpe. The customs and peculiar idiosyncrasies of Cambridge are fertile material for good writers.
Fred Fairly is a charming, and innocent product of a simpler world as are Prof Flowerdew and Skippey and the whole "Disobligers"(!!!!) society.

Where The Gate of Angels springs its surprises, and offsets the whimsical world of St.Angelicus college so beautifully, is via Daisy Saunders.

The deliberate contrasting of Daisy and Fred creates a book that throws in a number of very loosely, and tenuously connected incidents. Supporting characters have cameo roles, and chaotic dilemmas, most of which are left unresolved at the end of the book.
That's what makes Fitzgerald a worthwhile and original reading experience.

[José · Rating 2 out of 5]

Una historia que parece escrita a base de pinceladas inconexas, casi impresionistas. Detalles como el sufragismo ambientan su época.