Fitzgerald, Penelope, << fihts JEHR uhld, puh NEHL uh pee >> (1916-2000), was a British novelist and biographer. Fitzgerald won acclaim for her richly varied stories, many of which focus on unusual communities.
Fitzgerald won the 1979 Booker Prize, the United Kingdom’s best-known literary award, for Offshore (1979). This short novel portrays a strange social mixture of individuals living in a houseboat community on the River Thames during the 1960’s. She based The Blue Flower (1995) on the life of the German Romantic poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis. Fitzgerald’s other novels include The Bookshop (1978), Human Voices (1980), At Freddie’s (1982), Innocence (1986), The Beginning of Spring (1988), and The Gate of Angels (1990).
Penelope Mary Knox was born in Lincoln, England. Her father, Edmund Knox, was a noted British humorist, essayist, and editor of the British humor magazine Punch from 1932 to 1949. Her uncle Ronald Knox was a famous theologian and detective-story author. Penelope received a degree in English literature from Somerville College at Oxford University in 1939. She married Desmond Fitzgerald, a British literary critic, in 1953.
Before making her reputation as a novelist, Fitzgerald worked as a writer at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), as a tutor, and as a bookstore clerk. In 1975, she completed her first book, a biography of the English Victorian painter Edward Burne-Jones. Her first novel was The Golden Child (1977), a murder mystery. It was followed by The Knox Brothers (1977), a biographical memoir about her father and his three brothers. She wrote another biography, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984), about an English poet of the early 1900’s. Fitzgerald spent the last months of her life revising her family memoir The Knox Brothers. The revised edition was published in 2000, after her death.
