All accidents of our lives are materials out of which we can make whatever we like. One who has much intelligence will make much of his life. Every acquaintance, every incident might, for a thoroughly gifted person, become the first link of an infinite series, the beginning of an unending novel.
—Novalis, Pollen

Penelope Fitzgerald is anything but an autobiographical novelist. Yet four of her nine novels have grown directly from personal experiences. Her various positions as a clerk in a bookstore, as a sound assistant at the BBC during the Second World War, and as a teacher of child actors gave rise respectively to The Bookshop (1978), Human Voices (1980), and At Freddie’s (1982). Fitzgerald’s third novel, Offshore, which won the Booker Prize in 1979, is set on the Battersea Reach of the Thames where Fitzgerald herself lived on an old wooden barge until it sank. These early novels owe much of their success not only to the quaint charm of their settings —and there is plenty of that—but also to the unsparing precision of Fitzgerald’s observations.

She is sharp, but compassionate, softening the bite of her remarks with gentle humor. In Human Voices, she described the British Broadcasting Corporation, an institution with a personality of its own, as a “cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn’t too sure where next week’s money was coming from.” The barge dwellers in Offshoreaspire