Penelope Fitzgerald was the daughter of Punch editor Edmund Knox and the niece of theologian and crime writer Ronald Knox, cryptographer Dilly Knox and Bible scholar Wilfred Knox.

She was educated at Wycombe Abbey and Somerville College, Oxford - one of the first women to go up to Oxford. She worked for the BBC during World War II. In 1941, she married Desmond Fitzgerald, an Irish soldier; they had three children, a son and two daughters. For a time she lived in Battersea on the Thames, on a houseboat named Grace.

She launched her literary career in 1975, at the age of 58, when she published a biography of pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898). This was followed two years later by The Knox Brothers, a joint biography of her fathers and uncles.

In 1977, she published her first novel, The Golden Child, a comic murder mystery with a museum setting inspired by the contemporary Tutankhamun mania. Over the next five years she published, more four novels, including The Bookshop (1978), which was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. Fitzgerald won the Booker Prize with 1979’s Offshore

Next was Human Voices (1980), At Freddie’s (1982), and a non-fiction biography of Charlotte Mew, (1984), followed by Innocence (1986), The Beginning of Spring (1988), The Gate of Angels (1990). Fitzgerald’s final novel, The Blue Flower was published in 1995. The book, which won the American National Book Critics award in 1998, has been called Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.

A collection of Fitzgerald’s short stories, The Means of Escape, and her collected letters So I Have Thought of You, were published posthumously.