In the opening scene of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel “The Beginning of Spring,” Frank Reid, an Anglo-Russian, comes home to his house in Moscow and finds that his wife, Nellie, has left him. Writer describes this novel, like her others, as the comedy of tragedy… She once told a jounralist that she was “likely to be stamped out with other things unlikely to succeed.”… She is considered a modern classic—of all British novelists “the best, possibly,” A. S. Byatt (who has a stake in these matters) told Arthur Lubow in a recent piece in the Times Magazine.

Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel ”The Bookshop” is a little gem, a vintage narrative — first published in 1978 — of parochial English life in the late 1950’s, a classic whose force as a piece of physical and moral map making has not merely lasted but has actually improved with the passage of years.

It is 1959. Instant coffee is fresh on the market; ”Lolita” is just out; the snazziest young women in London are starting to swap their stockings for tights. But damp little Hardborough on the eroded seacoast of Suffolk, locked in the eastern flatlands George Crabbe’s poems made famous, with its very odd population of rapping poltergeists and zany proles as well as posher folks who’re used to getting their own masterful way, is a place by no means ready for the shock of the new, certainly not in the shape of a bookshop that Florence Green, a (widow, has determined to set up in a ruin called ”the Old House.” ”The Bookshop” is Florence’s sad ”Rake’s Progress,” a tragicomedy of good will and literate courage thwarted, a pained and smarting story of the old exterminating angels of the English class system in full and damaging flight. (read more)

The Means of Escape
By Penelope Fitzgerald.

Her nine novels are short. Having begun to write them in her 60’s, Penelope Fitzgerald, who died this year at 83, must have felt she had too much to say, too fast, to afford prolixity. Even her finely tempestuous biography of Charlotte Mew, a minor but refulgent English poet, is terse by modern standards: a mere 275 pages.

Small meant large, as readers have come to realize. The droplet Fitzgerald furnishes is a world, not the world as we know it but as she incites us to suspect it. She turns us into microscopes: we see not only her characters’ thoughts, purposes and actions but the gallivanting, subvisible antibodies that disarrange them. (read more)

CHARLOTTE MEW AND HER FRIENDS With a Selection of Her Poems. By Penelope Fitzgerald. Foreword by Brad Leithauser. Illustrated. 276 pp. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. $17.95.

Charlotte Mew was called the ”greatest living poetess” by Virginia Woolf, while Ezra Pound and Siegfried Sassoon were only a little less devoted to her intensely wrought, inward poems. Marianne Moore considered her ”Collected Poems ” (1954) ”above praise.” Nevertheless, Mew remains all but forgotten. Penelope Fitzgerald, a distinguished English novelist, has undertaken an important act of literary excavation in ”Charlotte Mew and Her Friends.” She tells of unusual talent almost stifled by fear of insanity (Mew’s beloved brother Henry and sister Freda became schizophrenic) and by the repression of a powerful lesbian drive. (read more)

HUMAN VOICES

By Penelope Fitzgerald

144 pages. Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin. Paperback. $12.

”Adverbs,” Umberto Eco replied when someone asked him what ”The Name of the Rose” was really about. More significant than his story and characters is the drift of voice in which they eddy. In the same way you might say that Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels are about subordinate clauses. A leading action, a statement, a mood are yanked from below like a fishing float and dart zigzag away.

At one point in ”Human Voices,” Vi Simmons, employed in wartime London, brings a fellow worker to stay in her mother’s house, from which a previous roommate had upsettingly decamped. ”Mrs. Simmons, who was generous enough not to learn from experience, welcomed a new lodger,” the author writes. (read more)