A. S. Byatt ends her preface to So I Have Thought of You, a collection of Penelope Fitzgerald’s letters, with a moment of personal reminiscence:

"I spoke to her, possibly for the last time, at one of the award parties for the Cohen Prize. She looked distracted, as she usually did at parties. I asked if she was writing, and she looked at me searchingly and asked: 'How do you think of a novel?'"

Byatt reflects on Fitzgerald’s question – “She made it appear a question of extreme difficulty” – and doubts that these letters will answer it, even if they illuminate other things. Byatt taught with Fitzgerald in the 1960s at Westminster Tutors: a sixth-form crammer for candidates taking the old entrance exams to Oxford and Cambridge. (It seems unlikely that those lucky students would have found more exciting instruction when they got to university.) By the time they met at the Cohen Prize party, in the late 1990s, both women had crossed the divide between teachers and practitioners of fiction. Both had won the Booker Prize, and Fitzgerald’s novel The Beginning of Spring had become an A-level set text, of the kind she used to help her pupils cram. It is moving that they paused at that party to puzzle about the novel again.

Fitzgerald’s letters do suggest at least some answers to the question: “How did she think of a novel?”. Written between the years 1939 and 2000, but with large gaps for the lost letters that sank to the bottom of the Thames with Fitzgerald’s houseboat, they elucidate the relations she envisaged between poems and novels; and the affinities she explored between biography and fiction. It is journalistic commonplace to describe Fitzgerald as a “late flower”, a jam-making grandmother who took to novel writing in her sixties and mysteriously wiped the floor with writers half her age, yet there is plenty of evidence in these disparate letters to suggest that hers was always an intensely literary life. Poetry was her earliest and deepest love; biography the first genre she mastered; and the novels for which she has become world-famous emerged from the confluence of these two passions.

In a review of Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf (reprinted in A House of Air), Fitzgerald wrote:

"As a child, a journalist’s daughter, I felt most clearly the distinction between the undemanding Georgian world I lived in and the world of Bloomsbury. My world was Hampstead, muffin men, autumn leaves, Peter Pan at Christmas, the Poetry Bookshop where Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies and Eleanor Farjeon read aloud our favourite verses (for this was the last era when poets and the general public were on easy terms with each other.) Bloomsbury was brilliant, poetryless, Cambridge-hardened. In comparison, we knew we were homely."

Her letters deepen our understanding of the gulf she perceived. There was no resentment of Bloomsbury. To her old friend Hugh Lee, editor of the Charleston Newsletter, Fitzgerald writes in 1986, “I think it was awe, rather than hatred, that we shabby long-ago Georgians felt”. But the rise of a Bloomsbury industry did annoy her, and her instinct, as ever, was to support the weaker party, with which she unreservedly identified. “Everything has to be about Bloomsbury!”, she complained to J. Howard Woolmer in 1999, “And I’m perhaps the last person alive who used to go to sleep as a child with a coal fire and the P[oetry] B[ookshop] rhymesheets on the walls.”

Fitzgerald, who was born in 1916, loved those rhymesheets. Her first letter to Woolmer was a reply to his TLS advertisement of 1978, asking for material pertinent to the Poetry Bookshop which the poet Harold Munro, determined “to do something about poetry”, had opened at 35 Devonshire Street, Bloomsbury, in 1912. (“His weakness and paleness did not impress us”, Virginia Woolf wrote in 1919.) The rhymesheets, plain or hand-coloured, sold well for the shop. They used to be displayed in the window, and Fitzgerald met many people who loved them as much as she did, including Bob Pocock who, “when he was a policeman on the beat (1928–9) used to shine his torch into the window of the (second) bookshop and learn the poems off by heart”. When she contacted Woolmer, Fitzgerald was collecting material for “a book about the Poetry Bookshop and its own particular poets – Anna Wickham, Charlotte Mew and F. S. Flint”. At this time, she had already published two biographies: Edward Burne-Jones (1975); and The Knox Brothers (1977), a composite biography of her father, Edmund Knox, the editor of Punch, and his three brothers. In 1978, her second novel, The Bookshop, appeared. She sent it to Woolmer: “I thought it might amuse you as it’s about a (very small) bookshop”. Two years later, there is a letter to her publisher Richard Ollard, “As far as my Poetry Bookshop is concerned I do realise that you’ve turned it down, kindly but firmly 4 times so far . . .”. “So far” says so much: she was not going to give up.

Eventually, Fitzgerald’s obsession with the Poetry Bookshop resulted in an extraordinary biography, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984). Charlotte Mew killed herself on March 24, 1928, by drinking Lysol, a household disinfectant and “the cheapest poison available”. She was fifty-eight. Towards the end of her life she had become friends with Thomas and Florence Hardy. The “King of Wessex”, that grand old man, thought that Mew was “far and away the best living woman poet, who will be read when others are forgotten”. Fitzgerald records a poignant scene at Florence Hardy’s sickbed: “On one occasion Charlotte called at the same time as Virginia Woolf. They confronted each other at Florence’s bedside, but unfortunately both of them were too shy to speak”.

Mew had been sheltered and helped by the Poetry Bookshop, which published and sold her poems in a chapbook. As a physical space that once existed and is lost, it haunts Fitzgerald’s letters and imagination. Writing to Richard Garnett in 1978, she mentions that T. S. Eliot “told me that the Poetry Bookshop staircase made an appearance in Ash Wednesday”:

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who
wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair.

Returning to the physical places that have housed or inspired writers troubled Fitzgerald. Of Charleston she writes:

"I can remember what it was once like from a visit when Duncan Grant was there – admittedly a dreadful mess – but it doesn't seem at all right either now that it’s clean and tidy – the same is true of William Morris’s house at Kelmscott (I don’t remember him, but I do know he kept an Iceland pony in the kitchen). Tolstoy’s house in Moscow I liked, largely because the curators had got out of hand and were making tea all over the place. – But perhaps I’m ungrateful to feel like this."

Fitzgerald scarcely had a house of her own. Her houseboat, Grace, sank twice. In the 1960s, she lived with her husband and three children in a flat on a London Council estate. As a widow she lived with one of her daughters, running a post office in Somerset. At her death, she was living in a tiny Highgate flat where there was hardly room for her books, but supported always by her close caring family (“I really don’t see how one can do without a family”, she writes to an old school friend in 1977). Hers was truly a “house of air”, or words and rhymes. The child who fell in love with poetry on her nursery walls, kept herself calm during childbirth by reciting Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”, “right through”, and often quoted Hopkins’s line “And you were a liar, you blue March day” to herself “on those lovely days when some dreadful thing or dreadful loss happens and seems even worse because of the blue sky”.

Fitzgerald’s letters reveal a second literary undertaking to which she was incorrigibly attached. For years she hoped to write a biography of the novelist L. P. Hartley. In 1984, in a letter to Michael Holroyd (whom she much admired for persuading the Arts Council “that history and historical biography are literature”), she finally admits defeat and lists the reasons why Leslie Hartley’s life eluded her:

"1. Leslie’s sister who breeds deerhounds and is in every way delightful, but much firmer than Leslie, won’t consider giving permission for the use of any material which might reflect the slightest discredit on her brother, or suggest that he died of drink. 2. a mysterious paternity case was brought against him towards the end of his life, which was heard by a judge in chambers, so I can’t see the papers. 3. Leslie, who was very interested in ghosts, appears to be haunting his old home near Bath, now a leisure and canoeing centre called “Misty Waters”. And so on, and so on.

Fitzgerald had known Hartley and was interested by his novels. She wrote to her friend Francis King in 1978 that she had got stuck on Venice and Compton Bassett, the background to Hartley’s The Boat (1950). “And yet I feel there’s the whole story of an era there, and LPH was so much nicer than Forster.” Again, she was drawn to championing the weaker, or perhaps just less appreciated, of a pair of literary figures; again she distanced herself from Bloomsbury and Cambridge, without in any sense detracting from their, or E. M. Forster’s, value. Earlier, she enjoins King to agree that “the worst thing about the opening of Howards End isn’t so much the letter itself (as a method) as the ‘One may as well begin with.’ It makes me feel resentful. Why begin at all, if that’s how he feels about it”. To Mary Lago, editor of Forster’s letters, she writes about the film of A Room with a View, in 1987: “I felt the weakness of the book (George’s father acting as a kind of nursemaid, as one of EMF’s embarrassing ‘wise’ characters)”.

In 1989, Fitzgerald gave a short interview to Libération, entitled: “Why I Write”. Her first reason was that “Unlike history, fiction can proceed with confidence”. Her third was “to make money”. Her second reason was enigmatic:

"I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost. They are ready to assume the conditions the world imposes on them, but they don’t manage to submit to them, despite their courage and their best efforts. They are not envious, simply compassless. When I write it is to give these people a voice."

I have never been certain what this really means, resonant though it is with the kind of characters one meets in Fitzgerald’s novels. One of the most important letters in this collection is a help in understanding it. In 1979, writing for the first time to Frank Kermode (“the only critic, and indeed the only Professor of Eng. Lit, whose opinion I value since Lionel Trilling died”), Fitzgerald begins:

"I hope you won’t mind my writing to you, partly because I’ve relied so long and so much on The Sense of an Ending in trying to teach university candidates something about fiction . . . but also to thank you for what you wrote about me in The London Review of Books. Could I make one comment – you said in passing that the “apocalyptic flood” at the end of Offshore wasn’t a success and I expect it isn’t, but it isn’t really meant as apocalyptic either – I only wanted the Thames to drift out a little way with the characters whom in the end nobody particularly wants or lays claim to. It seems to me that not being wanted is a positive condition and I hoped to find some way of indicating that. – I realise too that the danger of writing novels, even very short ones, is that you get to take yourself too seriously."

There the letter ends: characteristically short, exquisitely constructed, and saying something extremely important, not just about her own novel, or twentieth-century British fiction generally, but something subtle and under-celebrated about the human condition as well. “Not being wanted is a positive condition.” Fitzgerald’s is a radical view of what it means to love unrequitedly (like Annie Asra in Human Voices, who is told by an observer, “You are not wanted as you should be, not appreciated as you wish, in this like me, in this very much like me”). Florence Green at the end of The Bookshop is another example: “As the train drew out of the station she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop”. Fitzgerald had an exceptional ability to show failure, shame, shyness, even seeming obtuseness, in the unworldly light that restores them to grandeur. “Gentleness is not kindness”, she insisted, as only someone intimately acquainted with both could.

These letters are exciting for what they contribute towards the understanding of Fitzgerald’s imagination. In time there will be more definitive editions, extensively annotated and chronologically ordered. The artificial division between letters she sent to “Family and Friends” and letters about her “Writing” will disappear. And other people who have letters from her not included in this volume might be encouraged by it to come forward. There is little ground to doubt that Fitzgerald was a writer of genius. That claim, of course, would have made her uncomfortable, guarded as she was against taking herself too seriously.

Penelope Fitzgerald
So I Have Thought of You
The letters of Penelope Fitzgerald
532pp. Fourth Estate. £25.
978 0 00 71366640 7

Ruth Scurr is writing a biography of John Aubrey. She is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

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