This is a public service announcement.
I know we just told you what you want this holiday season, but let’s just add one more thing to the list. You want a Penelope Fitzgerald novel. I haven’t read enough of her work to know which one yet, so I’ll let you choose. I’m nice like that.
Here’s what happened: I recently got my hands on a lovely Everyman’s Library volume of three Fitzgerald novels—The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, and The Blue Flower. I blazed through The Bookshop and I’m halfway through The Gate of Angels, and I am on the brink of buying many many copies and forcing them into the hands of my book-loving friends. And maybe a few enemies. Or…wait. Is it possible I’m behind the curve on this? Have you read her entire canon, and been talking about them, and not told me about it? Have you been holding out on me?
(Quick facts: Penelope Fitzgerald, 1916-2000, first novel published 1977. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize shortlist for The Bookshop, 1978; won for Offshore, 1979.)
I’ve been thinking about Fitzgerald and how she fits into the post-Austen world—not because I compare every writer to Austen, but because they share a certain scope and wryness, and because if you are writing small-town British romantic dramas and novels of ideas, well, Austen is there. It’s all in the lack of sentimentality, I think; like Austen, Fitzgerald writes about people and relationships with grace and sometimes affection, but also with honesty and irony and a willingness to make fun. I suppose these aren’t strictly Austenian traits, but within the genre, the resemblance is noticeable—and I can’t help thinking there’s a literary inheritance there. She’s certainly more Austen than Bronte, or Waugh, or Wodehouse. (How she approaches romance, I can’t say: The Gate of Angels is shaping up to be a love story, but frankly, I’m not convinced that requited and realized true love is where this train is heading. Will report back.)
The other voice I hear echoed in Fitzgerald’s work is that of Margaret Atwood, which may be a function of time and age—middle-aged to older women writing in the last quarter of the twentieth century—or may simply be a massive compliment to both sides. I find in Fitzgerald’s writing a prickliness that is not unlike Atwood’s, and also a sense of realism when it comes to the inner lives of women. Both have a keen eye for struggle, particularly female struggle, though the fight to hang on to the tongue of an elderly English plow horse during a dental procedure (IT’S A METAPHOR, GUYS!) reads differently than, say, dystopian robot alien lady overlords disguised as everyday Canadian life. (I’ll let you guess who’s who in those scenarios.)
In any case, Austen Nation, can I recommend Penelope Fitzgerald to you? Her writing is lovely and sharp, sad and funny, atmospheric and pragmatic. What more can I say?
We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.
austenacious 