Biography of Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Knox Fitzgerald (1916-2000) was born into a bookish family in Lincoln, England. Her father, E.V. Knox, edited Punch magazine from 1932-1949. (Punch is a British satire weekly started in 1841. It coined the term “cartoon” in the modern sense.) Her uncle wrote detective fiction. Her aunt was also a prolific and popular novelist. Penelope’s mother Christina studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, not long after it opened for women. Penelope went to Somerville herself in 1935 and did brilliantly. She co-edited the student newspaper and graduated with a first. After graduation, she worked for the BBC and wrote film reviews for Punch. Her biographer, Hermione Lee, says Penelope had “all the makings of someone who was going to start publishing books in her 30s.” But she didn’t. At 25, she married Desmond Fitzgerald, a former officer with the Irish Guards. She had three children and settled into domestic life. But as Hermione Lee points out, it would be too simplistic to conclude “marriage stopped her writing.”Instead, she incubated every facet of her life and transmuted it into fiction decades later.