Among the many pleasures of this sad life is the subtle and perceptive way in which Lee makes a creative connection between Fitzgerald's 60-year incubation of her genius and the complex riches of her final years.Īt first, Mops shone at Oxford. These include The Bookshop, Offshore (winner of the 1979 Booker prize), The Beginning of Spring and The Blue Flower. This is the enigma that Lee sets out to penetrate, articulating the greatness, as she sees it, of the novels Fitzgerald published between the ages of 60 and 80. "Sharp as a knife is old Penelope," wrote one friend, "and goes to great lengths to pretend not to be." All her life, she wore a kind of disguise, inspired by her family, using her formidable intelligence to cover her tracks and avoid personal exposure. Like many children with conspicuous relatives, she wanted to do her own thing but not give anything away. Growing up a Knox was a challenge for the young girl. Penelope, who was always "Mops", was doomed to domesticity within a paternalistic world. Her journalist father, Edmund, was "Eddie" or "Teddy" or – when he wrote for Punch – "Evoe" (pronounced "ee-vee"). Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin were household gods. Fitzgerald came from the kind of English tribe, the Knox family, that was clannish, competitive and defended against outsiders by private codes and language.
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