Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a wonderful collection, 30 Jul 2008
These letters, which are probably the last we'll hear from one of the most nuanced, least imitable voices of recent decades, are lit from start to finish by the intelligence, warmth and sense of life's (often comic) pathos which characterised everything Fitzgerald wrote. The collection is divided into two equally fascinating parts. The first, which comprises Fitzgerald's letters to her family and closest friends, is remarkable for the detailed portrait it manages to give, despite her habitual self-effacement and the large gaps in her correspondence. Here we see her as a loving and attentive mother, a generous friend, and - of particular interest, given that she didn't start publishing books until her late fifties - as a witty and charismatic young woman. In the second part, which covers Fitzgerald's writing life, we learn how brusquely she was treated, early in her career, by publishers and members of the literary establishment (and - a surprise to those of us who can't remember the days before a Booker win brought with it immediate fame and fortune - that she had to go on teaching for several years after receiving the prize); as well as a wealth of information about her unfinished biographies of L.P. Hartley and the Poetry Bookshop. The preface by A.S. Byatt and the introduction by Terence Dooley provide tantalising glimpses of Fitzgerald from the perspectives of those who knew her personally (Byatt was her colleague at Westminster Tutors, a college preparing students for the old Oxbridge entrance exams, long before either had established their literary reputations; Dooley was her son-in-law), as well as a few startling insights into her fiction - who knew, for example, that the name Annie Asra, in Human Voices, was an allusion to a poem by Heine? - which, along with the clues and intimations contained in the letters themselves, have sent me right back to the novels, with an even greater respect for the depth of her achievement.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Gift, pure and simple, 31 Jul 2008
That Fitzgerald is a little known genius still astonishes me. Her novels are one and all among the finest written in English. They are lyric, wise, and perfectly wrought, and if they are at times tragic, it is because they reflect the world as it is, and not as it ought to be. And their beauty makes up for their truth.
And now the letters. It's true that there aren't many--the ones between Fitzgerald and her husband, for example, went down when her houseboat sank (the adventure on which her book, Offshore is based). But what we have exemplify her at her best. Wry, tender, honest--sometimes curmudgeonly, other times hilarious--they show us the raw talent that percolated until the author was 60 years old.
Buy them, read them, and compare them to the best of the genre: The Collected Letters of Ted Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Merton, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield--just to name a few.
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11 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Penelope Fitzgerald remains as elusive as ever., 23 Jul 2008
The publication of this book has been delayed for several years and having just read it, or most of it, I wonder whether these letters were worth publishing at all.A good third of the book consists of letters to her children and friends and they read like any letters from a well educated woman to her nearest and dearest. The remainder are letters to other people, mostly her publishers and these are somewhat more interesting. Nowhere though is there any illumination of her particular genius, she hides herself so well behind her public persona to render herself almost invisible. People wanting to know more about her as a writer should probably avoid this publication.
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