Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. She was the author of a collection of stories entitled The Means of Escape, nine novels, three of which – The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels – were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And she won the Prize in 1979 for Offshore. Her most recent novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the ‘Book of the Year’. It won America’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and this helped introduce her to a wider international readership.
A superb biographer and critic, Penelope Fitzgerald was also the author of lives of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (her first book), and the poet Charlotte Mew.
Penelope Fitzgerald did not embark on her literary career until the age of sixty. After graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, she worked at the BBC during the war, edited a literary journal, ran a bookshop and taught at various schools, including a theatrical school; her early novels drew upon many of these experiences.
She died in April 2000, at the age of eighty-three.
RICHARD HOLMES’ first book was Shelley: The Pursuit which won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974. Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize, and was followed in 1998 by its highly-acclaimed sequel Coleridge: Darker Reflections, which covers the latter part of the poet’s life. He is also the author of Dr Johnson & Mr Savage (1993), Footsteps (1985), and Sidetracks (2000). Richard Holmes is a Fellow of the British Academy and in 1992 was awarded an OBE. He lives in Norwich and London with the novelist Rose Tremain.