The three novels in this volume all display Penelope Fitzgerald’s characteristic wit, intellectual breadth and narrative brilliance.
The Bookshop is a contemporary comedy of manners, set in a provincial town. The Gate of Angels is a historical novel set in 1912 at a fictional Cambridge college. The Blue Flower traces the dramatic early years of the young German who was to become the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis.
One of the Regulars
At the back of Penelope Fitzgerald’s only short-story collection, The Means of Escape (2000), there is a charming black-and-white photograph of the author. It shows her buttoned into a...
Read moreThe Art of Bookselling
Just as most good books aren’t really about the things they say they are, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop (1978) isn’t really about a bookshop. It’s about English insularity, politics, the...
Read moreLove and Miss Lotti
Was anyone ever as singular as Charlotte Mew? Mannish, gruffish, diminutive, she ranged about London in her tailor-mades and cropped hair and rolled her own cigarettes, possibly with the discarded...
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