Novelist, poet, essayist and biographer, she described herself as ‘an old writer who had never been a young one’. She began writing at the age of 58, and was sixty when her first book (a biography of the pre- Raphaelite artist Burne-Jones) was published. Penelope Fitzgerald is best known for her nine novels, three of which were shortlisted for the Booker prize. They are short, subtle novels – typically less than 200 pages.
The daughter of literary parents, Fitzgerald left Somerville College, Oxford with a First Class degree in 1938. She worked for the BBC during the war and in 1942 married Desmond Fitzgerald, whom she had met at Oxford. In the early 1950s she and her husband co-edited a magazine called World Review, but after her husband’s legal career came to an ignominious end they lived for eleven years in a council flat. She worked in a bookshop in Southwold, Suffolk and in the 1960s taught at a stage school and an independent girls’ school in Kensington; she continued to teach until she was seventy.