The NYT on The Blue Flower (1997)

by Michael Hoffman

Penelope FITZGERALD’S first novel was published in 1977, when she was already 60. Since then, three of her nine novels have been short-listed for the Booker Prize in England, and her ”Offshore” won the prize in 1979. She had a varied professional life before she took up novels. She had written a couple of biographies and, as she amiably stresses in biographical notes and interviews, brought up three children.

Her first five novels are all set in England, in the present or the recent past. Many of them make comedies of institutions: the British Museum, drama school, the BBC, an East Anglian village (although her village is more a machine infernale than an institution). The typical Fitzgerald protagonist is an innocent who is fed into these systems, pitting his or her own surprising resources of courage and determination against the equally surprising eccentricity — shading into monstrosity — of the surroundings. All her books might be called ”Innocence,” although only one is. The exceptions are her child characters, who are repositories of awful knowledge. These dry, shrewd, sympathetic and sharply economical books are almost disreputably enjoyable — serious cousins, as it might be, of P. G. Wodehouse or the children’s writer Richmal Compton. (read more)