Reading

When I returned home from the library last Friday, I unpacked my backpack to see which books had been loaned to me.  One of them, a biography, I had no memory of requesting. I knew neither the name of the author (Hermoine Lee) or the subject of the book, Penelope Fitzgerald. I decided to read it anyhow, given that Fitzgerald was known for having published her first book at the age of 60 and having won the Booker Prize aged 73. Another three of her novels were shortlisted; not a bad record for the author of nine novels. I'm always happy to be inspired by a late bloomer, given the number of things I still aspire to accomplish in spite of soon turning 65. 

Though I'm now barely into the second chapter - this book has tiny print and is not an easy read, I spent much of the first chapter referring back to the family tree at the front, which had annotations that didn't become clear until I'd read well through that chapter - I believe I'm going to enjoy this challenging book. Fitzgerald lived between 1916 and 2000 and grew up in an illustrious family full of Church of England bishops, Catholic priests and writers - her father was editor of Punch magazine. Fitzgerald described her childhood home well enough to make one bask in the cosiness of interwar England. 

"She recreated the vanished 1920's Hampstead of her childhood with pleasure and precision. 

The village - and Hampstead still felt itself very much a village - was a place of high thinking, plain living and small economies. The steep charming old streets were full of ham and beef shops, old bookstalls, and an amazing number of cleaners and repairers, all helpful to shabby refugees and literary men. There was even a jeweller's where one bead could be bought at a time, for all the Hampstead ladies wore long necklaces. The livery stables had only just turned into a garage...poets walked the streets, Stanley Spencer pushed his pramful of painting materials aimiably across the Health...

This was a Georgian childhood. The streets in her memory were not only full of poets in their 'wide brimmed black hats', but also of lamplighters coming round to light the gas lamps, muffin men in winter, and lavender sellers in summer, knife grinders and chair menders, pony-carts brining dairy milk from the farm at Highgate. Gazes the drapers had everything you needed in 'the button, woollen, stockings and knicker line'; Knowles Brown the clockmaker had a silver clock in the window in the shape of a spaniel whose tongue moved up and down with every tick; small shops sold 'pennyworths of licorice'. 

Hampstead was literary, poetic, artistic, rural, part-bohemian, part-genteel. It was not a bit like Bloomsbury...Hampstead was 'undemanding' and 'homely'."

Fitzgerald's father and his brothers all went to Oxford. Two of her grandfathers were vicars and then bishops. The cosiness of their time is in part due to their station in life as much as in the time in which they lived. I'm always rather envious of the descriptions of the gardens / orchards / vicarages / country houses, all down south where they actually experience summer most years. 

My local library has only a couple of her books, but the Lit and Phil has more, including The Bookshop. I see that Hermione Lee has also written biographies of Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, also two intriguing books, The Lives of Houses and The London Scene. I don't think I'll ever run out of what to read!