Also to the archivists and librarians who have been so helpful in granting me access to their collections: John Rylands, Manchester (Norah Hartley), Senate House Library (Colin Haycraft/Duckworth), Macmillan publishers (Richard Garnett), HarperCollins (Richard Ollard, Stuart Proffitt, Mandy Kirkby), Wheaton (Malcolm Muggeridge), Huntington (Hilary Mantel), Princeton (Sir Frank Kermode), Missouri (Mary Lago), and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Texas (Francis King, Sybille Bedford, A.L. Barker, Richard Ollard, James Saunders, Julian Barnes, Mary Knox).
I would like to thank HRHRC most especially for the two temporary research fellowships they’ve given me, and for their excellent continuing care of Penelope’s archive.
Mandy Kirkby and Philip Gwyn Jones of Flamingo commissioned this book, Nicholas Pearson and Catherine Heaney of Fourth Estate took it onward, and Mandy Kirkby and Mark Richards have prepared it for publication with tact and devotion. Last and first my thanks to Maria, Valpy and Tina for their help, advice and support.
Also by Penelope Fitzgerald
Edward Burne-Jones
The Knox Brothers
The Golden Child
The Bookshop
Offshore
Human Voices
At Freddie’s
Charlotte Mew and Her Friends
Innocence
The Beginning of Spring
The Gate of Angels
The Blue Flower
The Means of Escape
A House of Air: Selected Writings
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London W6 8JB
www.4thestate.co.uk
Visit our authors’ blog: www.fifthestate.co.uk
Copyright © Estate of Penelope Fitzgerald 2008
Introduction © Terence Dooley 2008
Preface © A.S. Byatt 2008
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
The moral right of Penelope Fitzgerald to be
identified as the author of this work has been asserted
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
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* One of a set of London friends recently down from Oxford. PMF wrote to him as he was posted round the country in the early years of the war and after they resumed their friendship in the 1970s.
* PMF’s parents’ house.
** Oliver Breakwell.
* Janet Probert, a friend.
* PMF’s brother, Rawle Knox.
* The last of several not very serious ‘engagements’.
* Local Defence Volunteers.
* Jean Fisher, a friend.
* Brasenose College Oxford.
* Broadcasting House.
* On being shortlisted for the Booker Prize with The Bookshop.
* In his new role as editor of the Charleston Newsletter, having helped in the campaign to save Charleston House, once Vanessa Bell’s home.
** Dilly Knox.
† Waste-paper basket.
* Quentin Bell.
** The writers’ association.
† Novelist and, at that time, PEN committee member.
* Virginia Woolf’s play.
** Of that year’s Booker Prize. The Beginning of Spring had been shortlisted.
* The politician and former Labour MP.
** Salman Rushdie.
* Alyson Barr, a friend of Ham’s whom PMF had met separately through the William Morris Society.
* PMF’s elder daughter. The letters follow her through school trips, language courses, vacation nannying jobs, to Oxford, and finally to her move to the West Country.
* The future actor Ralph Fiennes and his sister, Martha, Christina’s god-daughter.
* Tina’s French exchange partner, Milène.
* Postcard.
* The English school in Córdoba where Valpy was teaching English and where Christina was studying Spanish.
* As a Nazareno in the Easter processions.
* ‘Willie’ was (Maryllis) Conder, a friend of PMF’s.
* Angelines, who eventually became Valpy’s wife.
* A TV broadcaster.
* Rawle’s son.
* Racine’s tragedy Britannicus (1669).
** Marielle de Baissac, a friend and colleague of PMF’s from Queens Gate School.
* Paul McCartney.
** The city.
* Valpy’s father-in-law.
* At Somerville.
* See p. 522.
* Mary Knox, PMF’s stepmother, had recently been widowed and had taken a secretarial job.
* Tina was doing postgraduate work on El Criticón, a work by the Spanish philosopher Gracián.
* Where PMF was on holiday with Willie and Mike Conder.
** Christina was now married to Terence Dooley.
* From morning sickness.
** Answer to botanical query.
* For the birthday of PMF’s grandson, Tina and Terence’s son, Fergus, who died in 1982. The card was A Boy Reading.
** PMF had offered to help round the time of the birth of Tina’s third child, Paschal.
* E.H.Shepard.
** Francis King, novelist.
* Paschal.
** To the Festival.
* The Arvon Foundation in Devon, where PMF had been teaching.
* Her grandson Luke hardly slept until primary school age.
** Paschal has Asperger’s, and only learnt to speak when he was seven. He is now a graduate.
* Maura Dooley, Terence Dooley’s sister.
* Paschal.
* Tina had had pneumonia.
** Stuart Proffitt, PMF’s editor at HarperCollins, who had recently left the company.
* Proffitt, now at Penguin Books.
* The literary agent.
* The Ground Beneath Her Feet, but she liked Haroun.
** Of the Fiennes family. Martha had directed Eugene Onegin starring Ralph.
* PMF’s younger daughter. The letters date from her first absences from home through to her time at Oxford. Thereafter she and her mother lived in London, and there was no further need for letters.
* Where Tina was nannying.
> * Valpy and Angelines.
* Rachel Hichens, a friend.
* John Lake, Ria’s boyfriend, now her husband.
* At St Mary’s, Hampstead, where PMF is also buried.
* The mother of her friend, Jean Fisher.
** Edmund Fisher, managing director of Michael Joseph, who published PMF’s biography of Edward Burne-Jones.
* Desmond was now working again in the travel business.
* The block in Victoria Street which housed Miss Freeston’s Westminster Tutors was under threat of demolition.
** To teach.
* The Mary Poppins Cookbook.
** Mary Knox’s father Ernest Shepard’s second wife.
† PMF’s biography of Burne-Jones.
* At Bletchley Park, as described in The Knox Brothers.
* Theologian, left-wing cleric, former Dean of King’s, Cambridge, who helped PMF with research for The Knox Brothers.
* Mavis Batey, Dillwyn Knox’s assistant, code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the war.
* The principal of Somerville College.
* Mary Knox’s memorial selection of her husband’s poetry.
* General Bertrand wrote the first book, in French, on the cracking of the Enigma code, in which Dilly Knox played a key part, at Bletchley Park.
** Christopher Knox, Dilly’s son, cousin to PMF.
* Where Valpy later became Professor of Economics.
** Greek scholar who assisted PMF with research on Dilly Knox’s classical scholarship.
* With the story ‘The Axe’.
* PMF’s best friend from Wycombe Abbey days. The surviving letters cover the years of Penelope’s widowhood and remember the annual holidays she spent at ‘Terry Bank’, the beautiful Jacobean house, built by a Conder, near Kirkby Lonsdale.
* The stained-glass window in Jesus Church in Troutbeck, near Windermere, by Burne-Jones.
* PMF was to attend the Hobart Literary Festival.
* The Blue Flower.
* PMF’s American editor at Addison-Wesley, Houghton Mifflin and Counterpoint.
* PMF and Rachel had known each other since childhood, in Hampstead, meeting through their mothers’ friendship. They saw each other at intervals throughout their lives. Her daughter, Elizabeth, was Penelope’s god-daughter.
* Rachel’s daughter Celia was married at the Church of St Michael, St Michael’s Mount, where Tom, Rachel’s husband, was chaplain.
* To India where she worked for the Mission for Lepers.
* Liz had announced her engagement.
* Liz’s husband; he’d taken a job in Strasbourg.
* PMF’s stepmother. As Mary Shepard, she illustrated the Mary Poppins books. Though they met frequently, they often wrote to each other. Sadly only these few letters survive.
* Knox.
* PMF’s sister-in-law; wife of Rawle.
* PMF’s editor for The Knox Brothers, published in 1977 by Macmillan.
* Eventually to be used on the cover of The Knox Brothers.
* Probably Richard Garnett’s assistant.
* Of The Knox Brothers.
** The Golden Child.
* Colin Haycraft of Duckworth who were to publish PMF’s first novel The Golden Child.
* Edward Thomas and Edward Garnett.
* The politician and former prime minister. He appears in The Knox Brothers as Ronnie’s pupil.
* She and PMF became friends when she helped research The Knox Brothers. A Germanist, she had assisted Dillwyn Knox with his code-breaking work at Bletchley Park. Later, she became a biographer, and a well-known garden designer.
* Christopher Knox.
* The writer, television personality and religious controversialist. PMF had consulted him while writing The Knox Brothers.
* Managing director of Duckworth. He published PMF’s first two works of fiction, The Golden Child and The Bookshop. The earlier part of this correspondence does not appear to have survived.
** Francis King.
* PMF’s first shortlisting for the Booker Prize. She won the prize in 1979 with Offshore, and was shortlisted again – twice – after that.
** Duckworth’s premises in north London.
† The Booker Prize dinner.
†† An unwise question that had an unwiser answer.
* This may refer to Colin Haycroft’s satire in defence of the short novel, published in the TLS.
* On Offshore being shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
* On Offshore winning the Booker Prize.
* Novelist, critic and valued friend, PMF worked with him at PEN International. He encouraged her to undertake the biography of L.P. Hartley, and provided the necessary introductions to his circle.
** L. P. Hartley’s sister.
* A reference to death in an accident of the Haycrafts’ son, Joshua.
* For the Booker Prize, with The Bookshop.
* Robert Liddell and Elizabeth Taylor the novelists.
* Haycraft.
* He had been awarded the OBE.
* On Offshore winning the Booker Prize.
** Robert Robinson, the broadcaster.
* L. P. Hartley’s sister, who gave PMF a great deal of help in her research into her brother’s life.
* Professor of English at the University of Missouri. She edited E. M. Forster’s Letters and wrote on Edward Burne-Jones and Rabindranath Tagore. She and PMF met every year during Professor Lago’s research visits to Oxford and Cambridge.
** Principal of St Hilda’s, friend of PMF’s since undergraduate days (as was Barbara Craig, Principal of Somerville).
* Georgiana Burne-Jones.
* John Christian was executor to Raymond Watkinson, the William Morris and Pre-Raphaelite scholar, a good friend of PMF’s.
* Published as Novel on Blue Paper.
* The then Collins building in Mayfair.
* Disliking flying, Mary Lago always took the QE2.
* PMF’s introduction to Myers’ The Root and the Flower has been reprinted in two subsequent editions by different publishers.
* PMF invented the puppies.
** By Hilary Spurling.
† By Ann Thwaite.
So I Have Thought of You Page 55