Her drunken barrister husband was disbarred for fraudulently cashing cheques that belonged to the Clerk of his Chambers the family drifted into Micawberish poverty and the family home, a shabby Thames barge, sank at Chelsea wharf – all these disasters were weathered somehow or other. When my heart is broken, I say, 'cripes!'"įor the rest of her life, she kept her lips buttoned. "When I fall in love, which happens twice a year, and wish to end a tempestuous quarrel, I usually say, 'Drat you'. As an undergraduate at Oxford, she wrote an article – for Cherwell, the student newspaper – about the impossibility of young women, such as herself, using strong expletives. Her life, too, was apparently lived on the principle of diffidence. Her fictions are stories of unspoken, misunderstood, unrequited love, of unsatisfactory marriages which are never – as they might be in a modern therapy session – talked through, of ironies which depend for their effect on semi-silences. She carried discretion far beyond the point of impenetrability. First, in life as in prose, she was the mistress of what was left unsaid. Penelope Fitzgerald poses a number of insuperable problems for a biographer. A workmanlike biography of Penelope Fitzgerald persuades us that she was one of the finest writers of her time – but the novelist herself remains an enigma
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