Christopher J. Knight's Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of
Fiction is a study of the British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1916
- 2000), attending to her nine novels, especially as viewed through
the lens both of "late style" (she published her first novel, The
Golden Child, at age sixty) and, in her words, of "consolation,
that is, for doubts and fears as well as for naked human loss." As
in Shakespeare's late, religiously inflected, romances, the two
concerns coincide; and Fitzgerald's ostensible comedies are marked
by a clear experience of the tragic and the palpable sense of a
world that verges on the edge of indifference to human loss. Yet
Fitzgerald, her late age pessimism notwithstanding, seeks (with the
aid of her own religious understandings), in each of her novels, to
wrestle meaning, consolation and even comedy from circumstances not
noticeably propitious. Or as she herself memorably spoke of her own
"deepest convictions": "I can only say that however close I've
come, by this time, to nothingness, 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 a comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear
it?" The recipient of Britain's Booker Prize and America's National
Book Critics Circle Award, Penelope Fitzgerald's reputation as a
novelist, and author more generally, has grown, since her death,
significantly, to the point that she is now widely judged one of
Britain's finest writers, comparable in worth to the likes of Jane
Austen, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
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