Penelope Fitzgerald's career as a literary critic started young. At school she wrote reviews of plays and lectures for the Wycombe Abbey Gazette, and at Oxford she provided short pieces on the arts for Isis and Cherwell, the two main University newspapers. In her twenties, Fitzgerald contributed more than fifty book, film and theatre reviews for Punch, and in her early thirties she wrote or co-wrote more than twenty essays on European art, literature and culture for World Review, the short-lived periodical that she edited with her husband Desmond. In the last two decades of her life, after she had won the Booker Prize and become well-known, she wrote more than two hundred reviews of fiction and biography for the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review and other British and American newspapers and journals, as well as introductions for books and editions, travel essays, art criticism, literary essays and journalistic sketches. This is an impressive volume of work by any measure, only a relatively small selection of which has been collected and is currently in print, in House of Air (2003). Because Fitzgerald's reputation is chiefly as a novelist and biographer, very little to date has been said about this body of critical writing, despite what it reveals about the cosmopolitan range and depth of her intellectual and artistic sympathies, enduring attitudes and priorities in her work (such as the central places held by humour, stoicism and emotion), and the marked stylistic continuities between her criticism and fiction. This chapter considers the nature of these critical sympathies, priorities and tastes, and their significance for Fitzgerald's fiction, by examining selected examples of Fitzgerald's writing from Punch, World Review and her later book reviews and critical essays.

Time and again in her criticism Fitzgerald meditates on what would become two of the most distinctive features of her own writing: a searching appreciation of the emotional, psychological and social interplay between fictional characters, and a prose style apparently without art. In 1952 Fitzgerald observed of Alberto Moravia's The Conformist: