A House of Air. Hermione Lee

      A House of Air

      Selected Writings

      Penelope Fitzgerald

       Edited by Terence Dooley with Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff Introduction by Hermione Lee

       For Valpy, Tina and Maria and in memory of Desmond, Mary and Evoe, and Mops

      Table of Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

       Dedication

Introduction

Editor’s Note

PART I Master-Spirits

JANE AUSTEN Emma’s Fancy

WILLIAM BLAKE The Unfading Vision

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE Talking Through the Darkness

SARAH ORNE JEWETT The News from Dunnet Landing

GEORGE ELIOT The Will to Good

MRS OLIPHANT The Heart and Soul of Carlingford

THE VICTORIANS Called Against His Will

WILLIAM MORRIS His Daily Bread

ARTS AND CRAFTS Lasting Impressions

       RHYME AND METRE Obstacles

       M. R. JAMES Monty and His Ghosts

       THE WORLD OF PUNCH Thin, Fat, and Crazy

       YEATS AND HIS CIRCLE A Bird Tied to a String

       NEW WOMEN AND NEWER Dear Sphinx

       BLOOMSBURY A Way Into Life

       MODERNS AND ANTI-MODERNS The Great Encourager

       THE FORTIES AND AFTER What’s Happening in the Engine Room

       PART II Writers and Witnesses 1980-2000

       WRITERS A Secret Richness

       WITNESSES Grandmother’s Footsteps

       PART III Places

       THE MOORS

       PART IV Life and Letters

       CURRICULUM VITAE

       SCENES OF CHILDHOOD Well Walk

       ASPECTS OF FICTION Following the Plot

       WHY I WRITE

       How I WRITE: DAISY’S INTERVIEW

       PART V Coda

       LAST WORDS

       INDEX

       About The Author

       Praise

       By the same author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       INTRODUCTION by Hermione Lee

      Because Penelope Fitzgerald’s genius as a writer of fiction lay so much in reticence, quietness, and self-obliteration, her admirers will come to her posthumously collected nonfiction with intense curiosity, searching for her likes and dislikes, her preferences and opinions and feelings, in these wonderfully sympathetic, curious, and knowledgeable pieces on writing, art, craft, places, history, and biography. And, in a generous selection of twenty years’ worth of essays and reviews, we do find (especially in the last section, on ‘Life and Letters’) Fitzgerald’s point of view very plainly set out. She believed, as a novelist, that (as she said to me in an interview in 1997) ‘you should make it clear where you stand.’ Here, speaking of E. M. Delafield, she asks: ‘What is the use of an impartial novelist?’ She is forthright and candid here about her moral position in her novels: ‘I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?’ ‘Everyone has a point to which the mind reverts naturally when it is left on its own. I recalled closed situations that created their own story out of the twofold need to take refuge and to escape, and which provided their own limitations. These limitations were also mine.’ Such utterances throw a revealing light on the novels. But they are also rather cryptic: she expects us to understand what she means by the ‘point’ the mind ‘reverts to naturally’; she doesn’t tell us what she thinks her limitations are. She has a way of saying strange, challenging, unsettling things in a matter-of-fact way, as if these were self-evident truths. Her manner is plai n and mild; her prose never shows off. She is practical and