but not give anything away. All her life, she wore a kind of disguise,
inspired by her family, using her formidable intelligence to cover her
tracks and avoid personal exposure. "Sharp as a knife is old
Penelope," wrote one friend, "and goes to great lengths to pretend not
to be."
This is the enigma that Lee sets out to penetrate, articulating the
greatness, as she sees it, of the novels Fitzgerald published between
the ages of 60 and 80. These include The Bookshop, Offshore (winner
of the 1979 Booker prize), The Beginning of Spring and The Blue
Flower. Among the many pleasures of this sad life is the subtle and
perceptive way in which Lee makes a creative connection between
Fitzgerald's 60-year incubation of her genius and the complex riches
of her final years.
At first, Mops shone at Oxford. "Her name," gushed Isis, "is famous
at the Union and the English school." Within a sought after group
known as Les Girls, she was "the blonde bombshell" from Somerville,
and of course she got a first. "When I go down," she told the readers
of Isis, "I want to start writing."
But then the war came, and she began to work for the BBC. Here she
fell in love, hopelessly and perpetually, with an older man who
remains unidentified. Wartime allowed no room for emotional selfindulgence. In 1942 Mops Knox married a dashing Irish Guards
officer, Desmond Fitzgerald, and her postwar path was set. By 1948
she was living in Hampstead as a wife and mother, contributing to the
BBC, with most of her Oxford promise shattered. This part of her life
would be consigned to silence.
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Now her literary ambitions became absorbed in co-editing, with
Desmond, a short-lived cultural magazine, the World Review, which
flourished brilliantly until its inevitable demise in 1953. Her marriage,
meanwhile, was in trouble, though she would never acknowledge this.
In 1957 the Fitzgeralds left London in hurry, amid a suspicion of
unpaid bills, and moved to Southwold.
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