Hermione Lee. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 2013. [Book Review]

The English author Penelope Fitzgerald died in 2000 at 83, bringing to an end a brilliant, compact body of literary works. She had a reputation for writing short, quiet, clever novels in which no word is wasted. She won the Booker Prize in 1979 for her novel Offshore, was nominated on two other occasions for the same prize, and her final novel, The Blue Flower, won a major prize in the US. In addition to nine novels, she wrote several biographies, as well as short stories, numerous critical reviews and essays, and a lifetime’s worth of letters.