Hermione has to head off now! Thanks for all your great questions.
Join us on the Reading Group on Tuesday, when we’ll discuss which Angela Carter book we should read in February...
palfreyman says:
As her biographer, is there one question you wish you had been able to get her to answer, and why?
Guardian contributor I did know her a little, and I interviewed her several times for radio and print interviews, before I knew I was going to be her biographer. I often wish I’d known at the time, but she was an elusive and private person and would probably have given me evasive answers. There was someone she was in love with, unrequitedly, for a long time: it comes into many of her books and she sometimes mentions it indirectly. I would love to know who it was, but she would never have told me. And I would like to have asked her about her dreams.
Vasco Resende says:
Was Penelope Fitzgerald a religious person? If so, do you think it reflects at a substratum level on her novels?
Guardian contributor You are right, she was religious, and the Christian church was very important to her. But she is not explicitly religious in her books (she used to say she regretted this). The books are full of prayer, miracles, a sense of an other world beyond the world we know. But they are not at all explicitly Christian (the conventional religious people in her books are pretty ineffectual). They are interested in the relationship between the body and the soul, in mystery, and in human aspirations, however muddled, towards something larger than an individual life. But they are not at all preachy.
hemingway62 asks:
What is your view on Offshore winning the Booker prize in 1979? Compared to most of her other fiction I found it a poor contender for the Booker short list, let alone the winner for that year.
Guardian contributor It was up against some big names, like Naipaul and Weldon. But – even if it isn’t your favourite of her books - I think the judges recognised something rare about it, the evocation of a place and time in an extraordinarily intense, spare, confined narrative, the painfully truthful story of a failing marriage, and the enchanting eccentric lives of the boat people and the children. It’s also a very good book about poverty, grief, regret and hope.
stoneofsilence says:
In the writing of a life; does the other life impinge upon yours?
Guardian contributor I don’t believe in biography as a form of autobiography, but certainly if you are writing about Virginia Woolf or Edith Wharton or Willa Cather or Penelope Fitzgerald you are powerfully affected by the personality you are writing about, and find yourself very bound up with the story of the life. At the same time it’s a book you’re writing, it’s not a marriage or a personal relationship, and you have to keep a certain distance.
lljones says:
As you noted in your book, C.K. Stead, in a LRB review of Innocence, “…kept asking himself, with wonder and admiration: ‘How is it done?’”
Our own Sam noted on his intro to the Reading Group: “How is it done?” asked Jan Morris in her review in the Independent of The Beginning of Spring. (A few years later, Michael Dibdin would also ask “How on earth was this done?” when reviewing The Blue Flower, as did AS Byatt.)
Julian Barnes, again referring to The Blue Flower, asked: “How does she do that?... I have reread [the washday] scene many times, always trying to find its secret, but never succeeding.”
Do you feel you found a satisfactory answer to this question for yourself? And did Fitzgerald know how she did it?
Guardian contributor What attracted me to PF as a subject was partly the mystery of her personality and the sense in her writing that there is always something not quite explained, something mysterious you can never find: like the blue flower itself. I tried hard to work out how she made her effects: so for instance at the start of the chapter about The Blue Flower I spent two pages on the first paragraph of the novel, asking how she creates a particular mood and tone. But in the end she keeps her secrets!
Kungfulil wants to know:
Are there any unpublished writings? Unfinished stories by PF?
Guardian contributor There were some unfinished sketches which I wrote about in my book; there were unpublished stories which were published after her death in The Means of Escape; and she was planning for years to write a biography of L.P.Hartley, and a book on the meaning of Renaissance flowers. I wish she had written both of them.
'You have to be ruthless and candid as a biographer'
deadgod asks:
How hesitant were you in handling the material that might have been personally embarrassing to Fitzgerald? (—for example, her husband’s embezzlement, or her undeserved (?) coldness towards her daughter-in-law.) Especially with a person who impresses one not just in their work, but in their character—a person whom one feels (or imagines one should feel) fondness for—, one wants not to be gratuitous or merely sensational — as you never are in your biography, but I think of kindness, as well as fairness, as being not inevitable, but rather, an achievement.
Guardian contributor You have to be ruthless and candid as a biographer, or you would never tell any truths about anyone. At the same time I think it’s important to be fair, generous if possible, and empathetic to your subject. I have never written a biography about someone I didn’t admire, and whose work I didn’t love; but when it comes to their faults and failings (we all have them) you have to tell the truth.
Benjamin Cavanagh says:
Two of her uncles were prominent Christians and another was atheist. I think her father was more ambivalent. I am curious to know the origin of Penelope’s own religious beliefs and was there any big conversion story or was there an influence on her eventual fairly quiet CofE participation? Did she ever write about this aspect of her life?
Guardian contributor She was a Christian, and went to Church - but organised religion is somewhat satirised in her books and her faith was kept back from the surface of the work (which she used to say she regretted). The books are full of prayers, some of which get answered, miracles (as at the end of The Gate of Angels) and mysteries - also smaller phenomena like a highly convincing poltergeist in The Bookshop (which she used to matter of factly say she had experienced herself.) Above all she believes in the deep connection between the body and the soul. Blue Flower is all about the sense that though we live surrounded by thick material things, we are on the edge of another world.
'Why do I like her? I can't think of another writer who writes more deeply and wisely about loss and harm'
MythicalMagpie says:
Thinking about it, you must really like an author’s writing to go to the trouble of writing their biography. I’d like to ask Hermione Lee what she particularly admires about Fitzgerald’s books.
Guardian contributor Yes, I couldn't imagine spending between five and seven years with a writer in my head without liking their books. I am drawn to PF for a mixture of reasons: a lot has to do with the comedy of human life. She makes me laugh out loud. I think she is wonderful about muddle, hypocrisy and embarrassment. But she also makes me cry. I can't think of another writer who writes more deeply and wisely about loss and harm, but also about the need to battle on.
Ongley says:
I am still to read any Penelope Fitzgerald, but I was wondering what is her reception abroad and do her books translate well? I don’t mean this in a strictly literal sense.
Guardian contributor The Blue Flower won the National Critics Book Circle Award in 1998 and at that point she became hugely well known in the States, for that book and for The Bookshop which is much loved by reading groups. She does get translated into French and other European languages too (The Bookshop in France was called L'Affaire Lolita, which makes it much more spicy) but I don't know how much she sells on the continent.
Racine62 asks:
Was it easier to empathise with Fitzgerald more than the formidable Edith Wharton?
Guardian contributor Edith is like a great ship of state, full of luxury and wealth and people and grand relationships and big travels: I loved all that, and wanted to make my book on her as full and grand and lavish as possible, like a series of richly furnished rooms. Penelope, by contrast, is spare, austere, apparently simple, so I wanted to cut down. But they are both equally savage, witty, lacerating, sharp, when the mood takes them.
Ring leader of our Reading group, samjordison asks:
I hope this doesn’t push too far into the realm of speculation... And it’s also a bit of a half-question... But I’ve always wondered if Penelope Fitzgerald was able to write so well partly because she came to it so late after years of thought... Or if, had things been different, we could have had another 40-years-worth of masterpieces? Do you have any definite thoughts on that?
Guardian contributor It's rather like the last question only the other way round. But I agree with you that part of the magic is the sense of things having matured in her mind. She is very interested in "lateness:" - things coming late to people, people having to wait for things.
Scuff wants to know:
If Fitzgerald had begun writing in her 30s, what sort of books might written, and do you think they would have affected the books she did write later in life?
Guardian contributor Fascinating What If question. I don't think I know the answer, but she might have revealed more about the passions and frustrations that were part of her life at that time. But I think it worked well for her, in fact, the saving up of materials: Human Voices, for instance, is such a brilliant account of life in London and at the BBC during the Blitz, just because it has had time to settle down in her mind. Sorry, this is a rather evasive answer: like many questions about PF, I think the answers are hard to find.
Wondergirl says:
I read her biography of her father and uncles, The Knox Brothers, after reading her novels, and then I realised how she had done it as it were, that she came from a family of thinkers and writers, that in a way, her writing life was the life she was born, raised for, having grown up in that atmosphere. Can you say something about this aspect of her life and work?
Guardian contributor This is absolutely crucial to everything she did. The Knox Brothers is a marvellous, odd, funny, touching book and brings to life vividly the eccentric brilliance of her family. They were a mixture of priests and code-breakers and literary editors - all with a very strong sense of integrity and an absolute refusal to compromise. It wasn't an easy family to grow up in, particularly for a brilliant young woman.
Our very own C1aireA has a question:
Hello Hermione and thanks so much for coming in.
Do you think one could describe her as a historical novelist, on the basis of her later books? Or do you think that creates a false division in her oeuvre? And what would she have thought about it?
Guardian contributor I always think of historical novels as big thick fully furnished operations, like War and Peace. PF has the extraordinary ability to conjure up a very particular historical place and period - Russia just before the revolution, Italy in the 1950s - with the most economical and subtle strokes, so that you feel you are completely inhabiting that world, without thinking of it as "history". That;s what makes The Blue Flower so extraordinary.
'I'm very interested in this question of how a biography can be true to a life...'
machenbach asks:
The way Fitzgerald constructs her characters is an implied rebuke to some of the reductive ‘explanations’ that some biographers (present company excepted, of course) tend to rely on when they represent their subjects. Her characters are often enigmatic and Fitzgerald rarely imposes an authorial explanation for what they say or do – something that the biographer is usually constrained to provide. Was that something that you took on board in your biography of her? She states in an interview that “You shouldn’t read fiction for [biographical] truth.” To what extent do you agree with that? Or how do you interpret it?
Guardian contributor I'm very interested in this question of how a biography can be true to a life. I don't believe the cradle to grave historical method is necessarily the best one, particularly not with a very well known life like Virginia Woolf's. I think you have to try and find a structure and a tone which best expresses the writer's character and life-story.
allworthy says:
I am interested to see how her art affected writing. Bainbridge also artistic and produced artworks mirroring her writing.
Guardian contributor she was extremely interested in art and artists and wrote a wonderful book on Edward Burne-Jones, in which William Morris was the hero. She was very fond of Morris and everything he stood for: the usefulness of art for ordinary life, the ideal of the social purpose of the artist. Her books are full of people who can do things: look after a boat, nurse people, run a printing press. She believed in craft as part of artistry. She also drew, very vivid and vigorous little drawings of family, children, cats, places, which she would send to her friends as cards. I scattered them through my biography.
'I think she had a powerful sense of her own abilities and strengths'
ID9460718 asks:
Do you think Penelope Fitzgerald had any sense of herself as a great novelist and do you think she saw herself in any particular tradition of writer? Others originally put her in the Beryl Bainbridge school, whatever that was supposed to mean.
Guardian contributor I think she had a powerful sense of her own abilities and strengths: she knew how good she was and she was impatient to get started. She didn't want to be identified with other women writers particularly - "school of Barbara Pym", that sort of thing - in fact I think she's more like Turgenev or Beckett than like Bainbridge
Todd_Packer says:
Fitzgerald’s ability to evoke time and place-e.g Cambridge in 1912 in The Gate of Angels-is very impressive. Do you know how much research she did?
Guardian contributor She knew about that period of Cambridge life because one of her uncles, Dilwyn Knox, was there, and she knew all about M.R.James and the early scientific experiments of the time. So part of that was family lore. But you're right, she always did a lot of research on the later novels set back in time - 3 years of reading Novalis in German for The Blue Flower!
'My favourite Fitzgerald novel? I change on this frequently'
Karina74 asks:
What’s your favourite Fitzgerald novel, and why?
Guardian contributor I change on this frequently, depending on which one I've just re-read. I love the four last great novels, The Beginning of Spring perhaps most of all, but I have a great affection and admiration for the more sharply comic earlier novels (though "early" and "late" are relative terms here) like At Freddie's and Offshore. Which also have their tragedies.
machenbach says:
I greatly enjoy Elizabeth Bowen and Penelope Fitzgerald and know that you have written about both of them, but I can’t think of a good question to ask you. Can you?
Guardian contributor Obviously I share your enthusiasm for both. Here's a good question: if you hadn't read either of them, which book would you start with? Answer: The Beginning of Spring, and The Death of the Heart.
Michealmack has three questions:
What did/do you think about Fitzgerald and feminism? Did you think her “hopeless” as she seems to have thought that you thought she was?!
Do you think that if Fitzgerald wasn’t on the 1998 Man Booker Prize judging panel that Beryl Bainbridge would have won the prize, instead of forever being the Booker Bridesmaid? I appreciate that you can’t know that but I’m interested in your thoughts on the matter.
Lastly if I may, are you looking forward to the film of The Bookshop? Or are you likely to avoid it at all costs? I’m torn as it’s one of my favourites of hers and have my own pictures already but if it means that Fitzgerald’s work is better known then it can only be a good thing. Hopefully.
Guardian contributor Three questions!
I think she had a very strong sense of the injustices done to women and the hard lives of women especially at the start of the 20th century. Look at Daisy in Gate of Angels, for instance. But she didn't want to join a movement or be labelled in any way. I think you could make a good case for reading her as a feminist writer, though.
Booker: I don't think it's fair to PF to imagine that she was vindictive about Bainbridge or deliberately set out to damage her chances of the Booker. Perhaps she just didn't like that novel.
I am looking forward to the film of the Bookshop mainly because Bill Nighy is playing Mr Brundish. And I am fascinated to see what they do with it. And you're right about wanting PF to be even more popular and widely known than she is.
Racine62 asks:
Do you think good biography is the revelation of secrets? With Penelope Fitzgerald I get the feeling that there were definitely things she didn’t want people to know. I think you handle the sensitive revelations superbly and there is no sense of invading privacy.
Guardian contributor Yes, PF was a very elusive character and although I met her and knew her a little, I feel sure that if I'd asked her direct questions about her life she wouldn't have answered! There are secrets and mysteries in many of the novels - it's one of the things I love about them. But she could also be quite caustic, plain, direct and funny, both in her life and in her work.
MythicalMagpie wants to know:
It sounds, from what I’ve read, that Penelope Fitzgerald didn’t have the easiest of marriages. Do you think she delayed her writing career because of this and how much do you think her experiences contributed to her writing?
Guardian contributor Yes, you’re right, she was held up, as women writers often are, by coping with a difficult marriage and by bringing up her three children under challenging conditions in the 1950s and 1960s. She started out as the brilliant, promising daughter of a very distinguished family, and looked all set to be a writer from an early age. Then came the war, and marriage to Desmond, who was a loveable and decent man but badly traumatised by the war and an alcoholic, and she had to keep the family afloat, teaching for many years. But all the time she was thinking about writing and getting ready to write: I think of it like an underground river running strongly beneath her life.
Fourpaws asks:
There have been many different interpretations of the meaning of The Blue Flower. Is there a meaning or did Penelope Fitzgerald leave it to the reader to find their own interpretation?
Guardian contributor Yes, Novalis/Fritz can never work it out, nor can anyone he tells the story to. It’s perhaps happiness; it’s perhaps a world beyond the one we know which Novalis’s romantic hero is always seeking for; it’s perhaps the quest for your heart’s desire, which is the purpose of being alive? “And”, as PF said of the novel, “even if there’s no possibility of reaching it you must never give up.”
Hermione is with us now!
Guardian contributor Hallo - delighted to be here to answer questions about my heroine Penelope Fitzgerald and The Blue Flower
Join us on Friday 27 January for a webchat with Hermione Lee
I’m delighted to say that Hermione Lee will be joining us on 27 January at 1pm GMT to answer questions about this month’s reading group subject, Penelope Fitzgerald.
Hermione Lee is the author of Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, a book described by Penelope Lively as “masterly” and “literary biography at its best”. In case that recommendation from one of our finest living novelists (and a friend of Fitzgerald) isn’t enough, the book was also called “brilliant” by Robert McCrum in the Observer, “excellent” by Nicholas Shakespeare in the Daily Telegraph, “admirable and perceptive” by Susan Hill in the Times, “richly satisfying” by Hilary Mantel … The list goes on and on, and rightly so. This book is superb – and greatly enriches our understanding of Fitzgerald and her wonderful novels.
Alongside her biography of Fitzgerald, Lee has also written acclaimed books about Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Philip Roth, Edith Wharton and Elizabeth Bowen. She is also one of our foremost critics. A collection of her essays on life-writing was published under the title Body Parts in 2005 and she published a Very Short Introduction to Biography in 2009.
She is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and is also president of Wolfson College, Oxford.
We are, in short, very lucky to be able to have her answering questions here. And asking is simple - just write a comment below the line. She will be tackling questions live, but please feel free to get yours in early.
Just to get the ball rolling, we’ve got five copies of Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life to give away to the first five people from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive question, in the comments section below.
If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Cecily Britt with your address (cecily.britt@theguardian.com) – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to her, too.
Updated
I'm heading off now. Many thanks for all your great questions.