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In July we reported that Tina Cuyugan has started a campaign to revive interest in the work of Penelope Fitzgerald. This was brought on by the publication of the prize-winning biography by Hermione Lee. Tina had been looking for a copy of the biography; we finally found one in Paris and schlepped it home (the hardcover is a doorstop).

In recent weeks, the novelist Alan Hollinghurst (The Line of Beauty, The Stranger’s Child) and critic James Wood have written about the late British author, whose career should inspire procrastinators everywhere because her first novel came out when she was 60. Everyone thought she was a dotty old lady who wore curtains. Well she did wear curtains, but she wasn’t dotty.

Hollinghurst in the New York Review of Books: “Hers was very much the art that hides art, and she had besides a horror of explanation. She can introduce characters in the most glancing way, so that it is as if we were put in a room with them, alert for any signal of who they might be. “I try to make everything quite clear,” she said, “but then I think, this is an insult to the reader…I shouldn’t like to have all this explained to me, and so I begin to cut out, whole chapters go.”

James Wood in the New Yorker: “Authority is part of the obscure magic of her achievement as a novelist. If one of the commonest critical responses to her work seems to be laudatory bafflement—“How does she do it?”—the beginning of an answer is that she proceeds with utmost confidence that she will be heard and that we will listen, even to her reticence. Her fictions sit on the page with the well-rubbed assurance of fact, as if their details were calmly agreed upon, and long established.”

This describes the experience of reading The Blue Flower exactly. Her final novel is eccentric, funny, oblique, and leaves you wondering how she manages to kill the reader without showing a weapon.

We are reading The Gate of Angels.