Penelope_Fitzgerald_A_LifeWhen Penelope Fitzgerald went up to Oxford, still not the commonest thing for a woman to do in the 1930’s, she attended the same college as her mother had a generation before. She took with her the copy of a “textbook” that her mother had used, of Spenser’s poetry, with her mother’s notes written in the margins of the book, to which Penelope would add her own.

By the time Penelope was ready to graduate, it was 1939. She listened anxiously to Hitler’s speeches on the radio, wondering what would come next. The kind of social and cultural continuity that textbook represented, and the sort of hermetically sealed Engish values that it stood for, were about to be permanently disrupted.

Penelope’s parents were both the children of bishops, an extraordinary thing. There’s a wedding photograph of Penelope’s parents, off to each side of the happy couple stand the respective fathers-in-law in their clerical garb, looking like something out of Trollope.

This was a time, as Hermione Lee points out, when the church and its network of vicarages were a powerhouse of British intellectual life. The set of brothers that Penelope’s father belonged to, that Penelope wrote about in an early biography. The Knox Brothers, were all remarkable for their intellectual and even religious attainments.

This was Penelope’s family heritage, and truth be told, it made her a snob about academic attainments. She received a brilliant first in literature from Oxford. When her beloved only son Valpy married, she was never quite satisfied with the daughter-in-law she got who was no academic. There was always some tension between them and it affected her relationship with her son, which became more distant, it looks like, as a result.

But there was another family tradition which operated in reverse. As much as her family esteemed intellect, to same degree they were no respecter of people with money. This played out oddly in her own life. Until she was a senior citizen and finally received critical acclaim as a writer and even after that, Penelope and her dysfunctional alcoholic husband Desmond and their children, were impoverished. Allow me to be blunt, they were a hard scrabble group, angling just to get by and sometimes they didn’t.

And here I come to a quirky feature of this biography. Hermione Lee is president of an Oxford college, an insider’s insider writing about an Oxford star. I had a right to fear that I was going to be confronted with the icy chill of an “official” biography. But that wasn’t the case. More fundamentally, the biography is eccentric because Penelope Fitzgerald’s life was. Fitzgerald didn’t publish a book until she had reached her sixties. The biography is lopsided in an isomorphic relation to the life. The first two thirds of the book is a pile up biographical details about family, friends, colleagues, early affinities and attempts to survive, and early experiences in writing and literature.

Only in the latter part of the biography does Hermione Lee have the opportunity to discuss Fitzgerald’s books in any detail and here the biography soars. These are model discussions of what a literary disquisition should be like and contain more impassioned yet disciplined feeling than the earlier portions of the biography. Hermione Lee is more comfortable and confident in writing about books than in writing about people.

But Lee is faced with several dilemmas in recounting such a quietly exceptional life. There’s that silly conundrum that you can’t talk about money or class without implying that you haven’t got any. I found some reviewers of this biography squeamish in that regard.

But when Lee mentioned, almost offhand, that Penelope’s family had to rush away from their rented house in Hampstead Heath because they had to avoid the landlord, my (up to this point) rather perfunctory reading of the text experienced an abrupt double-take. I had to go back and read the passage again. Did Lee really say, in so many words, that the family fled the property because they couldn’t pay the rent? This is followed, deadpan, with an account of the family’s technique of refrigerator ownership, which consisted of getting a fridge on approval and then returning it and getting another when the approval period ran out.

Throughout her distinguished life, Penelope kept the social, and later, the public gaze back. The Fitzgerald family lived roughly for many years in public housing. And then there are the rumors of a flexible attitude towards private property. During a later literary conference abroad which Penelope Fitzgerald attended, her roommate, another distinguished writer, asserts that an article of clothing was lifted. And other attendees report that scarfs went missing. Lee treats these stories in a balanced way, the biographer is unflappable! She notes the family denial that these incidents could have taken place but also observes that the stories would have fit in with other things that are known about the author.

Hilary Mantel notes on the cover blurb that this thorough and sometimes eloquent biography “will send you back to the subject’s own and elusive novels”. That’s the best effect of reading Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald. There’s a wonderful miraculous logic to Penelope Fitzgerald’s life. The sum of her life’s insight and experience culminate in an astonishing set of moderately scaled, late blooming, immoderately brilliant novels in her senior years.

Lee makes the fascinating point that Fitzgerald’s early writing experience, doing research as a biographer, played later into her fictional technique. Fitzgerald did compendious note taking for her novels, as if she were still researching a biography. She said that all novels were historical.

Outlines of character traits, lists of plot dos and don’ts, lists of what things cost. When in a novel she depicts a printer’s shop, Fitzgerald can enumerate all the employees that are likely to be there and what their function is. If a character travels by train to Moscow early in the twentieth century, Fitzgerald knows how much the ticket will cost. She’s studied period travel guides to pick up the details. Massive research funneled into a concentrated result.

I wanted to read all of Hermione Lee’s biographies after reading this one. She’s written about Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Bowen and Philip Roth. Also, you get a sense of how important Victorian and Edwardian culture and values were to Penelope Fitzgerald from reading this biography and I wanted to backtrack to read about that. We in America can’t really grasp how important these historical periods were, how central to English sensibility. We are too far removed from it.

Then there’s this: all her life Penelope Fitzgerald was guarded about the details of her life. She never, for example, trash-talked her disappointing husband and the great difficulties his ineptness caused the family. She made light of her struggles to raise her children in poverty while successfully sustaining their high academic and literary values. She made light of her overwork at jobs that were beneath her, cherished underdogs like herself, and kept smiling. Now comes along this voyeuristic biography…all biographies, like films, are voyeuristic…and blows apart Penelope’s reticence.

Hermione Lee alludes to this issue gingerly in the warm closing pages of the biography. The Oxford chill that is essential to conduct balanced and objective scholarship grates ironically against the passion of its subject.