The NYT on The Bookshop (1997)

Among the Proles and the Posh
By Valentine Cunningham

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)