Widowed Florence Green, living in the coastal Suffolk town of Hardborough, decides to buy an ancient quayside property the Old House, complete with dilapidated oyster shed, and open a bookshop in it. The Bookshop is more a novella in length, and it offers originality and surprises at every turn. I have no idea why I have ignored Penelope Fitzgerald for all these years – she is a wonderful discovery. The Bookshop, her second novel published in 1978, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. After a career as an editor, bookseller and literary journalist she turned to authorship in her late fifties, and during the rest of her life published a number of highly regarded novels and biographies. In the years after the Second World War she brought up her family in some penury, because of the alcoholism of her war hero husband. Penelope Fitzgerald, whose centenary was in 2016, was born into the literary and scholarly dynasty the Knoxes, daughter of the editor Edmund Knox, and niece of the more famous Ronald Knox the theologian and crime writer. The latest evocation of this landscape and its people is a novel that I expected to be about my favourite theme of books and reading, but is in fact far more about the people who do or do not buy them: Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop. My exploration started with Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, and continued with Rosy Thornton’s brilliant and evocative collection of short stories Sandlands and George Macbeth’s Poems from Oby.

And at the heart of it all are questions about how we appreciate culture, how we relate to books themselves, and why we allow our dreams to take hold of us against all reason.Ī deeply enjoyable read for fans of ironic British novelists.I am very much enjoying exploring a new literary landscape: East Anglia, the land of fens, floods and enormous skies. Its events are of no consequence, and yet somehow feel staggeringly consequential. In 10 short chapters, Fitzgerald outlines Florence's unsettling encounters with the townfolk in wry, pointed notes, never allowing us to become either sympathetic or deeply enmeshed in the lives of any of them. Her characters, like theirs, often hover on the fringes of good society the 'distressed gentlewomen', Pym often calls them.įlorence Green is one such character, a plain but still reasonably young widow who chooses to open a bookshop in a town that wants to reject her at every turn - even her resident poltergeist wants nothing to do with her. Her starkly funny - or perhaps humorous upsetting - style is akin to those great ladies Muriel Spark and Barbara Pym.

It is now de rigueur to declare Fitzgerald as one of the great neglected English novelists of the 20th century, and I must add my voice to that woeful chorus.

The bookshop penelope fitzgerald review