Penelope Fitzgerald has been acclaimed as one of the finest, if most enigmatic, British novelists of the late twentieth century. Nearly sixty when her first book was published, she went on to write nine novels, four of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and one of which, Offshore, won. Her final work of fiction, The Blue Flower, won the prestigious US National Book Critics’ Circle Award. She also wrote three biographies, a collection of short stories and countless critical essays and book reviews. Fitzgerald's works are distinguished by their acute wit, deft handling of emotional tone and unsentimental yet deeply felt commitment to portraying the lives of outsiders: those men, women and children ‘who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost’ (HA 508). Miracles of compression, her slender tragicomic fictions somehow contain worlds, transporting us to post-war London, Suffolk and Florence, pre-revolutionary Russia, Edwardian Cambridge and late eighteenth-century Saxony. Her style is deceptively simple yet an inclination towards the metaphysical, oblique and absurd is never far from the seemingly unruffled surface of her prose. The resulting sensation, as Fitzgerald said of reading E. M. Forster, is like ‘drinking strong wine out of a teacup – puzzling, not quite right perhaps, but in the end… all the more effective’. The strangeness of this effect has often been noted, yet the means by which she achieved it remain a mystery. Invariably readers ask, ‘How is it done?’ This book aims to answer that question.

Fitzgerald's life provides some clues. Born in 1916, Penelope Mary Knox grew up in a family of writers: ‘where everyone was publishing, or about to publish, something’ (HA 495). Her father was the comic journalist and poet E. V. (‘Evoe’) Knox, editor of Punch; her mother, Christina, contributed to the Manchester Guardian and Macmillan's English Literature Series of abridged classic texts; her aunt, Winifred Peck, wrote more than twenty novels; and her three uncles, Dillwyn, Wilfred and Ronald were distinguished scholars and thinkers, variously translators of ancient Greek poetry and the Latin Vulgate Bible, decipherers of enemy codes in two world wars, and writers of biblical commentary, Roman Catholic apologetics and detective novels. Wilfred and Ronald were ordained ministers – another family tradition: both of Fitzgerald's grandfathers served as Evangelical bishops in the Church of England.