During the years at Clifton Hill she was taking her writing in a new direction. An examination of her manuscripts in the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas seems to indicate that, however intense the thought and technique that went into them, her first four novels almost wrote themselves. Her pure fiction is entrancing, but now she was attempting to combine this with the novel of ideas, the metaphysical novel. She had been considering writing about Italy, and specifically Florence, for a decade, the book that after many evolutions became Innocence. An early version of the Ridolfis appears in a first draft, which was to have been about the great Florentine flood, and might even have been intended to be a detective story. It is Francis King she credits with putting her on track: ‘you’ll hardly remember, having been to so many other places since, that you told me the story of the Italian family and their dwarfs yourself’. This cruel legend or parable from the 1560s is retold by Penelope with a wealth of vivid apparently historical detail as the first chapter of Innocence, shedding its mysterious light and darkness over the Shakespearean comedy of tangled loves, with the rumbling of politics beneath, set in a 1950s Italy seemingly known and recreated from within. The Ridolfis of those earlier days were midgets. When their daughter’s companion starts outgrowing her her legs must be cut off at the knees.
The twentieth-century Ridolfis retain ‘a tendency to rash decisions, perhaps always intended to ensure other people’s happiness’. Stuart Proffitt, who took over as her editor on Richard Ollard’s retirement, suggested ‘Happiness’ as a title, but Penelope remarked that the novel could as easily be called ‘Unhappiness’. The happiness in question is marital. Constant misunderstandings drive the lovers, Chiara and Salvatore, together and apart. By the end their young stormy marriage seems to have been saved by a hair’s breadth, to be provisionally permanent. Salvatore throws up his hands:
‘What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.’
‘Yes, we can go on like this. We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.’
As well as telling a story, Penelope now sought to evoke a culture, and an historical period. Every page gives evidence of a lightly worn, instructive and relevant erudition: about viticulture, law, medicine, architecture, the cinema, fashion, economics, and, above all, politics. For Gramsci, the influential communist reformer who wrote of the ethical society, is the historical figure introduced here, his ideas appealing to Penelope in much the same way as did those of William Morris. Lastly, one should point out the striking, if idealised, resemblance of Chiara to Penelope herself, particularly in the cover-picture she chose for Innocence, one of Pontormo’s angels, from his Annunciation. The virtues of her new method were immediately recognised by the critics, and her reputation began to grow: she was again shortlisted for the Booker, the third of her four novels to be so honoured.
Through vicissitudes of archive-keeping, the letters to Stuart Proffitt about this and her next two novels have (I hope temporarily) disappeared. However, for The Beginning of Spring, her next novel, we do have the letters to Harvey Pitcher, author of The Smiths of Moscow, credited by Penelope as having been vital to her research. These, like many of the letters in the ‘Writing’ section, show how meticulous and indefatigable she was in this aspect of her work, with what a sense of adventure and enjoyment she undertook it. On one level The Beginning of Spring, first called Nellie and Lisa, is once again a brilliant tragicomedy of marital misunderstanding, memorable like Offshore for its depiction of children not unlike her own. The spring is also the Russian revolutionary spring, for she chose historical periods, which seemed to promise change, emancipation and spiritual rebirth. The novel’s first conception also dates back at least a decade. In Texas is a notebook entitled The Greenhouse, with an early draft of the story of the English expatriate printer which takes the firm on into the May Revolution itself, but this proved unworkable. Pitcher’s book and The Times’ Russian Supplements of the period provide the realistic detail, but the uncanny imaginative power that makes a countrified chaotic Moscow almost tangible surely springs from a deep knowledge of and affinity with Russian literature, especially the Tolstoy of Resurrection and Master and Man, whose idiosyncratic Christian socialism infuses the novel. More than this, in The Beginning of Spring, uninsistently, symbolically, mysteriously, the presence of the supernatural is felt, and it will continue to startle and unsettle (as do the ghosts of the future in the birch wood here) in her last two novels and late stories.
Her next novel, The Gate of Angels, is also set in the first decade of last century, on the cusp of the modern era. It revolves around an accident, which may have been caused by a ghost, and culminates in a miracle. Fred, the Cambridge scientist, and Daisy, the London nurse down on her luck, live in minutely recreated social spheres which are set never to collide. Yet ‘Chance is one of the manifestations of God’s will’ and they wake up naked in a Samaritan stranger’s bedroom, having been knocked off their bicycles by a carter who has vanished into thin air. (This incident was a real one, recounted in Edward Burne-Jones.) Penelope is at her most formally experimental and teasing in her late fiction, but she gave some clues as to the interpretation of this novel to an enquiring reader, Bridget Nichols:
The Gate of Angels is about the questions of faith and generosity…Dr Matthews is a portrait of Monty James. I set my novel in the Cambridge of 1912 because that was the height of the so-called ‘body/mind controversy’, with the scientists of the Cavendish in controversy with professing Christians, championed by James who was then Provost of Kings.
Dr Matthews, like M. R. James, tells ghost stories, and, in one of Penelope’s intertextual serious games, tells one here to explain the bicycle accident to himself by means of a local haunting. He adds plausibility to it, by seeming to ground it in his own youthful experience, telling it in the first person, something James never did. ‘Do I believe in such things?’ Matthews asks himself, and goes on: ‘Well, I am prepared to consider the evidence, and accept it if I am satisfied.’ That places retain the evil that was done in them, and that apparently ordinary people, like Daisy, for whom the gate of Angels opens, may have some healing force of goodness in them, these were certainly things that Penelope believed. She also wants us to accept the miraculous as part of life.
The Gate of Angels was the fourth of Penelope’s books to be shortlisted for the Booker, and it was on three other shortlists. Though it did not win, it received wonderful reviews, especially from other writers, and sold very well. Much was now expected of her. It was extraordinary enough to have started on a literary career so late, to have run it entirely on her own terms, only writing what she chose, never faltering either in excellence or variety; but perhaps the most remarkable thing of all was that her next and last novel, published when she was seventy-eight, should have been generally hailed as her masterpiece, and, despite its complexity and intellectual scope, become a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.
If The Blue Flower is certainly a novel and a work of the imagination, it is a most original one in that its hero and most of its characters were real people, yet it transcends the genres of biography and historical fiction: it seems to be an enquiry into what it means to be alive. With imperfect German but great concentration on what was germane to her artistic purposes, Penelope studied Mähl and Samuel’s Complete Works, Diaries, and Letters (including letters to him) of Novalis, the Romantic poet. It took her two years, and gave her ample material to write the story of his tragically curtailed life, if that had been her intention, but it wasn’t. What fascinated her