Penelope Fitzgerald may be the perfect proof that it’s never too late
At least as far as writing success is concerned
I’m reading — and greatly enjoying — Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald.
Fourth Estate is issuing new editions of Fitzgerald’s books and I picked up The Bookshop in, well, a bookshop last month. The novel is set in two of my favourite places — a bookshop and Suffolk — so it had me at hello, so to speak.
I knew little about Fitzgerald apart from her 1979 Booker win for Offshore but I remembered reading reviews of the Lee biography when it was published in 2013 and being interested, especially, in Fitzgerald’s apparently late arrival on the literary scene. She won that Booker, for instance, at the age of sixty-three.
She published her first novel aged sixty.
This late blossoming was of obvious interest to someone also hoping to blossom late. The Bookshop is short and almost perfect, so it inspired me to borrow a copy of the biography from the London Library.
I am far enough into the life now to realise that the late blossoming was more a case of blossoming postponed by life crises rather than a sudden uncovering of talent. Fitzgerald was always talented and had been expected — especially by herself — to have succeeded as a writer from the moment she left Oxford in 1938. War was merely the first obstacle she them faced.
I don’t plan to reprise the life here. What I take from Lee’s life is the positive message that ambition and talent may lie dormant for a surprisingly long time.
Two messages, actually. The second is that when life imposes its unique strains and pressures and creates the environment in which the seeds of talent may be forced to lie dormant, then, when the seed finally breaks ground, those life pressures may be found to be the perfect mulch for sturdy growth, however late.
As much as I hate that rather twee and glib phrase — it’s never too late — the Fitzgerald of Hermione Lee’s biography would appear to personify a perfect example of its veracity.
