Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction

<p>Christopher J. Knight's <em>Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction</em> 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.</p>