Penelope Fitzgerald

Born Penelope Mary Knox on December 17, 1916, at the Medieval Bishop's Palace in Lincoln, England, Fitzgerald grew up in a family of formidable intellects. Her father, Edmund Knox, edited Punch; her uncles included the theologian and crime writer Ronald Knox, the cryptographer Dillwyn Knox, who helped break the Enigma code, and the biblical scholar Wilfred Knox. She read English at Somerville College, Oxford, and in 1941 married Desmond Fitzgerald, an Irish soldier who later struggled with alcoholism and ill health. She worked for the BBC during the war, then taught, reviewed books, and raised three children while enduring decades of quiet hardship. For a time the family lived on a houseboat on the Thames at Battersea that sank twice, the second time for good, destroying most of her books and papers. She did not publish her first book until she was fifty-eight: a biography of Edward Burne-Jones (1975). Her first novel, The Golden Child (1977), was written to amuse her dying husband. The Bookshop (1978) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Offshore (1979), drawn from her years on the doomed houseboat, won it. In the 1990s, in her late seventies, she produced her greatest work: The Blue Flower (1995), a luminous novel about the German Romantic poet Novalis. A. S. Byatt called her "Jane Austen's nearest heir for precision and invention." She died on April 28, 2000, in London, at eighty-three.

In the 1960s Fitzgerald and her family lived on Grace, an old Thames sailing barge moored at Battersea Reach. It sank twice. The second time it went down for good, taking most of their books, papers, and furniture into the river. She was already in her forties, teaching by day to help feed three children.