Between 1977 and 1982 Penelope Fitzgerald, then in her early sixties, published five short novels in a remarkable surge of creativity: The Golden Child, The Bookshop, Offshore, Human Voices and At Freddie's. Throughout these years she continued to teach at the sixth-form crammer Westminster Tutors, only finally giving it up in 1987, aged seventy. Each of these ‘early’ novels draws upon Fitzgerald's own life, and all but one contain female protagonists who resemble Fitzgerald herself either in her youth or middle-age. (‘Early’ here refers specifically to Fitzgerald's career as a novelist; she had, as the preceding chapters of this book make clear, been writing for decades before her first novel was published.) In her later years Fitzgerald sometimes downplayed her first five novels: The Golden Child ‘was only a joke, such as I used to make then’; The Bookshop ‘will seem very old-fashioned by now’; and Human Voices she ‘couldn't quite get … to hang together, but it was the best I could do’ (SI 430, 203, 381). Critical responses too have been mixed. While both The Bookshop and Offshore were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the highest critical praise is almost always reserved for Fitzgerald's later historical novels. This has an unfortunate effect, making the earlier phase of Fitzgerald's novel-writing career look like a mere period of apprenticeship for the later.

Thinking this way risks underrating the earlier works’ particular pleasures. These include the deft evocation of wholly believable times and places, often on the periphery of things – a windswept outpost in Suffolk, the houseboat community on Battersea Reach, the raffish backstage world of At Freddie's; finely observed characters swept along, bravely, reluctantly, on cross-currents of thought, feeling and happenstance; sudden parabolic swerves in mood and story arising with a recognizable yet surprising logic from the situations in which people find themselves; dialogue that is by turns oblique, elliptical and heartbreakingly frank; submerged but telling allusions to other books, stories, plays and people; sharp criticism of cruelty in all its forms, and a corresponding sympathy for those who suffer from it. These five early novels may not be perfect – for A. N. Wilson, only one, At Freddie's, is ‘pure gold’ – but they all, without exception, cram more joyfully subversive wit, feeling and artistry within their narrow spans than do most novels of twice the length, and all richly repay re-reading.