LITMIR.BIZ

       INTRODUCTION by Hermione Lee

      Because Penelope Fitzgerald’s genius as a writer of fiction lay so much in reticence, quietness, and self-obliteration, her admirers will come to her posthumously collected nonfiction with intense curiosity, searching for her likes and dislikes, her preferences and opinions and feelings, in these wonderfully sympathetic, curious, and knowledgeable pieces on writing, art, craft, places, history, and biography. And, in a generous selection of twenty years’ worth of essays and reviews, we do find (especially in the last section, on ‘Life and Letters’) Fitzgerald’s point of view very plainly set out. She believed, as a novelist, that (as she said to me in an interview in 1997) ‘you should make it clear where you stand.’ Here, speaking of E. M. Delafield, she asks: ‘What is the use of an impartial novelist?’ She is forthright and candid here about her moral position in her novels: ‘I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?’ ‘Everyone has a point to which the mind reverts naturally when it is left on its own. I recalled closed situations that created their own story out of the twofold need to take refuge and to escape, and which provided their own limitations. These limitations were also mine.’ Such utterances throw a revealing light on the novels. But they are also rather cryptic: she expects us to understand what she means by the ‘point’ the mind ‘reverts to naturally’; she doesn’t tell us what she thinks her limitations are. She has a way of saying strange, challenging, unsettling things in a matter-of-fact way, as if these were self-evident truths. Her manner is plai n and mild; her prose never shows off. She is practical and

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