A House of Air
Selected Writings
Penelope Fitzgerald
Edited by Terence Dooley with Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff Introduction by Hermione Lee
For Valpy, Tina and Maria and in memory of Desmond, Mary and Evoe, and Mops
Table of Contents
WILLIAM BLAKE The Unfading Vision
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE Talking Through the Darkness
SARAH ORNE JEWETT The News from Dunnet Landing
MRS OLIPHANT The Heart and Soul of Carlingford
THE VICTORIANS Called Against His Will
WILLIAM MORRIS His Daily Bread
ARTS AND CRAFTS Lasting Impressions
M. R. JAMES Monty and His Ghosts
THE WORLD OF PUNCH Thin, Fat, and Crazy
YEATS AND HIS CIRCLE A Bird Tied to a String
NEW WOMEN AND NEWER Dear Sphinx
MODERNS AND ANTI-MODERNS The Great Encourager
THE FORTIES AND AFTER What’s Happening in the Engine Room
PART II Writers and Witnesses 1980-2000
WITNESSES Grandmother’s Footsteps
ASPECTS OF FICTION Following the Plot
How I WRITE: DAISY’S INTERVIEW
Because Penelope Fitzgerald’s genius as a writer of fiction lay so much in reticence, quietness, and self-obliteration, her admirers will come to her posthumously collected nonfiction with intense curiosity, searching for her likes and dislikes, her preferences and opinions and feelings, in these wonderfully sympathetic, curious, and knowledgeable pieces on writing, art, craft, places, history, and biography. And, in a generous selection of twenty years’ worth of essays and reviews, we do find (especially in the last section, on ‘Life and Letters’) Fitzgerald’s point of view very plainly set out. She believed, as a novelist, that (as she said to me in an interview in 1997) ‘you should make it clear where you stand.’ Here, speaking of E. M. Delafield, she asks: ‘What is the use of an impartial novelist?’ She is forthright and candid here about her moral position in her novels: ‘I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?’ ‘Everyone has a point to which the mind reverts naturally when it is left on its own. I recalled closed situations that created their own story out of the twofold need to take refuge and to escape, and which provided their own limitations. These limitations were also mine.’ Such utterances throw a revealing light on the novels. But they are also rather cryptic: she expects us to understand what she means by the ‘point’ the mind ‘reverts to naturally’; she doesn’t tell us what she thinks her limitations are. She has a way of saying strange, challenging, unsettling things in a matter-of-fact way, as if these were self-evident truths. Her manner is plai n and mild; her prose never shows off. She is practical and