Fitzgerald's fleeting escape to the seaside, leavened by part-time work
in a local bookshop, was dogged by indigence. By 1960, aged 43,
with a failing marriage and an alcoholic husband, she moved into a
leaky, semi-derelict houseboat on Chelsea Reach, a period Lee
describes as "bleak, difficult and dangerous". Things went downhill
fast. Desmond, caught stealing money from his chambers, was
disgraced. Then the houseboat sank, with the loss of all Fitzgerald's
possessions. By the late 1960s she was living in a squalid council flat,
making ends meet as a supply teacher, a middle-aged failure with no
prospects and, apparently, no future.
Never underestimate the steel of the true artist. It was from these
depths, defying the odds, that the novelist Fitzgerald emerged,
especially once her three children had left home. Her first three novels
– Human Voices, The Bookshop and Offshore – cashing the literary
cheques of bitter experience, drew on her life at the BBC, in
Southwold, and on Chelsea Reach. Typically, to her close family, she
pretended that her writing was a hobby not the belated start of her
professional life. She could never quite shake off the habits of
misdirection.
When Desmond died, she was free. Between 1978 and 1982,
Fitzgerald experienced a creative surge in which she published four
novels, established herself as a writer of consequence and won the
Booker prize for her tragi-comedy, Offshore. This latter success is
emblematic of her career. Only a handful of critics, notably Frank
Kermode and Victoria Glendinning, understood her gifts. Even to
herself, she was the outsider. When, against the odds, she snatched the
prize from the favourite, VS Naipaul, she had a lot of fun with the
literary press who cast her as a dotty old lady with ruddy cheeks. She
said she would use the prize money "to buy an iron and a typewriter".
In truth, this late recognition gave her the confidence to complete the
two novels, both masterpieces – The Beginning of Spring and The
Blue Flower – that make her biggest claim on posterity. In the world
of books, there are only two bets: the here-and-now and the yet-tocome. Fitzgerald always struggled with the form