Outsider …

… Jenny Turner reviews ‘Penelope Fitzgerald’ by Hermione Lee � LRB 19 December 2013. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Fitzgerald’s novels, Byatt concludes, are best approached as ‘very English versions of European metaphysical fables’ – English, maybe, in the sense that Muriel Spark was Scottish and Isak Dinesen Danish, and that Marguerite Duras was French. Byatt does not make this point, but it’s worth noticing, surely, that this minor modern tradition often attracts women writers, maybe because its minority and smallness work well with limited resources, or because its irony makes sense to writers in secret protest over the limitations within which they work. As a conventional literary career, Fitzgerald’s life’s work was, as one reviewer put it, ‘an awful hash’. But really and truly, in what universe does the phrase ‘literary career’ make the slightest sense? Not on a leaky houseboat, when life is a daily struggle to look after all the people you have to look after. Nor, presumably, in the realms of ethical life and spirituality. Though she said and wrote little about it, Fitzgerald was a practising Anglican, and when she went on a coach tour of ‘the Holy Land’ in the early 1990s, headed straight for the Jordan to be rebaptised.