![]() ![]() Fitzgerald set her next three books in different territories: in Italy in the 1950's, in prerevolutionary Russia, and in a Cambridge college Then, through ambition or restlessness, or feeling that she'd exhausted her own immediate material, Ms. Wodehouse or the children's writer Richmal Compton. These dry, shrewd, sympathetic and sharply economicalīooks are almost disreputably enjoyable - serious cousins, as it might be, of P. The exceptions are her child characters, who are repositories of awful knowledge. All her books might be called ''Innocence,'' although only one is. The typical Fitzgerald protagonist is an innocent who is fed into these systems, pitting his or her own surprising resources of courage and determination against the equally surprising eccentricity - shading into monstrosity - of ![]() Many of them make comedies of institutions: the British Museum, drama school, the BBC, an East Anglian village (although her village is more a machine infernale than an institution). Her first five novels are all set in England, in the present or the recent past. She had written a couple of biographies and, as she amiably stresses in biographical notes and interviews, brought up three children. She had a varied professional life before she took up novels. Since then, three of her nine novels have been short-listed for the Booker Prize in England, and her ''Offshore'' won the PENELOPE FITZGERALD'S first novel was published in 1977, when she was already 60. The New York Times: Book Review Search Article ![]()
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