Автор: Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald’s fascinating portrait of the tragic poet and her life at the heart of the Bloomsbury set.Thomas Hardy hailed her as ‘far and away the best living woman poet’; the formidable Charlotte Mew (1869–1928) was the writer of some of the best English poems of the twentieth century.In her private life, to all appearances, Mew was a dutiful daughter living at home with her elderly mother. But this respectable façade hid painful truths – the Mews were penniless, two siblings had been declared insane and Charlotte was secretly lesbian, living a life of self-inflicted…

A fascinating collection of letters from the great English novelist – and prolific correspondent – Penelope FitzgeraldAcclaimed for her exquisitely elegant novels – including the Booker Prize-winning ‘Offshore’ – and superb biographies, Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most admired authors in Britain during the last century. ‘So I Have Thought Of You’ is an invaluable addition her distinguished oeuvre.Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most distinctive voices in British literature. The prizewinning author of nine novels, three biographies, and one collection of short…

Penelope Fitzgerald, the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’ and ‘The Blue Flower’, turns her attention to the remarkable life of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones.‘I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone – in a land no one can define or remember, only desire’ Edward Burne-JonesEdward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) was the prototypical pre-Raphaelite but with a truly individual sensibility. Penelope Fitzgerald’s delightful biography charts his life from humble…

From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’ comes this Booker Prize-shortlisted tale of a troubled Moscow printworks .Frank Reid had been born and brought up in Moscow. His father had emigrated there in the 1870s and started a print-works which, by 1913, had shrunk from what it was when Frank inherited it. In that same year, to add to his troubles, Frank’s wife Nellie caught the train back home to England, without explanation.How is a reasonable man like Frank to cope? How should he keep his house running? Should he consult the Anglican…

From the Booker Prize-wining author of ‘Offshore’ and ‘the Blue Flower’ – this Booker Prize-shortlisted novel centres on Cambridge Fellow Fred Fairly’s search for a rational riposte to love.In 1912 Fred Fairly is a Junior Fellow at the college of St Angelicus in Cambridge, where for centuries no female, not even a pussy cat, has been allowed to set foot («though the starlings couldn’t altogether be regulated»). Fred lectures in physics and the questionable nature of matter and worries about the universal problem known in Cambridge at the time as ‘the absurdity of the…

A collection of Penelope Fitzgerald’s short stories.Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most highly-regarded writers on the English literary scene. Apart from Iris Murdoch, no other writer has been shortlisted so many times for the Booker. Her last novel, ‘The Blue Flower’, was the book of its year, garnering extraordinary acclaim in Britain, America and Europe.This superb collection of stories, originally published in anthologies and newspapers, shows Penelope Fitzgerald at her very best. From the tale of a young boy in 17-century England who loses a precious keepsake and finds it…

From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’, this is a funny, touching, authentic story of life at Broadcasting House during the Blitz.The human voices of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel are those of the BBC in the first years of the World War II, the time when the Concert Hall was turned into a dormitory for both sexes, the whole building became a target for enemy bombers, and in the BBC – as elsewhere – some had to fail and some had to die.It does not pretend to be an accurate history of Broadcasting House in those years, but ‘one is…

The Golden Child, Penelope Fitzgerald’s first work of fiction, is a classically plotted British mystery centred around the arrival of the ‘Golden Child’ at a London museum.Far be it for the hapless Waring Smith, junior officer at a prominent London museum, to expect any kind of thanks for his work on the opening of the year’s biggest exhibition – The Golden Child. But when he is nearly strangled to death by a shadowy assailant and packed off to Moscow to negotiate with a mysterious curator, he finds himself at the centre of a sinister web of conspiracy, fraudulent artifacts and…

From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’ comes this Booker Prize-shortlisted story of books and busybodies in East Anglia.This, Penelope Fitzgerald’s second novel, was her first to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is set in a small East Anglian coastal town, where Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop. ‘She had a kind heart, but that is not much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.’Hardborough becomes a battleground, as small towns so easily do. Florence…

From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’ and ‘Innocence’ comes this unusual romance between the poet Novalis and his fiancée Sophie.Set in Germany at the very end of the eighteenth century, The Blue Flower is the story of the brilliant Fritz von Hardenberg, a graduate of the Universities of Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg, learned in Dialectics and Mathematics, who later became the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis. The passionate and idealistic Fritz needs his father’s permission to announce his engagement to his ‘heart’s heart’, his ‘true Philosophy’,…

From the Booker Prize-winner of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’ comes this brilliant novel about life at an eccentric stage school.In the 1960s, Freddie’s was the usual name for the Temple Stage School, which supplied the West End theatres with children for roles in everything from Shakespeare to pantomime. Freddie, the proprietress, is a formidable woman, of unknown age and provenance. But everybody who is anybody claims to know her. By sheer force of character and single-minded thrust she has turned herself into a national institution.This story of what happened…

This Booker Prize-winning novel from the author of ‘The Blue Flower’ is set among the houseboat community of the Thames.‘Offshore’ is a dry, genuinely funny novel, set among the houseboat community who rise and fall with the tide of the Thames on Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, they feel as if they belong to neither…Maurice, a male prostitute, is the sympathetic friend to whom all the others turn. Nenna loves her husband but can’t get him back; her children run wild on the muddy foreshore. She feels drawn to Richard, the ex-RNVR city man whose converted minesweeper…

Stunning modern new cover reissue of one of Penelope Fitzgerald’s best-loved novelsInnocence is set in the 1950s, when Italy was picking up the pieces after the war. Chiara Ridolfi is the guileless daughter of a decrepit Italian family. Barney is her practical English girlfriend, who can sum up a man, she says, in one firm hand-grip. Salvatore is a penniless doctor from the south, who thinks he is proof against politics, social conscience and tenderness. Chiara’s cousin, Cesare, says very little, which gives him time to…

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEEThe previously uncollected occasional prose of a great English writer – full of wit, feeling and illumination.Penelope Fitzgerald was a prolific letter writer. She avoided the phone if she could, never even contemplated the possibility of going online. Her warmth, humour and supreme storytelling abilities found their best forum here. Surprising, wonderfully funny, definitive, this is a major collection of Penelope Fitzgerald’s reviews, essays and autobiographical writings.This collection includes pieces on contemporary novelists Giles Foden, Anne…

‘When I was very young I took my uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else in the world was not like them.’In this, only her second book, Penelope Fitzgerald turned her novelist’s gaze on the quite extraordinary lives of her father and his three brothers. A masterly work of biography, within which we see Penelope Fitzgerald exercising her pen magnificently before she began her novel-writing career.Edmund Knox, her father, was one of the most successful editors of Punch. Dillwyn, a Cambridge Greek scholar, was the first to crack the Nazi’s message decoding…