TAGS: Literature, Fiction, Classics, Short Stories, Essays, Biography, Letters, English Literature, Booker Prize

* Penelope Fitzgerald - Collected Works and Letters (15 books)

PENELOPE FITZGERALD (1916 – 2000) was a Booker Prize-winning English novelist, poet, essayist and biographer who A.S. Byatt called "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."  In 1999 Fitzgerald was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature".

Fitzgerald launched her literary career in 1975 with scholarly, accessible biographies of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones and two years later of The Knox Brothers, her father and uncles, although she never mentions herself by name.  In 1977 she published her first novel, THE GOLDEN CHILD, a comic murder mystery with a museum setting inspired by the Tutankhamun mania of the 1970s.

Over the next five years she published four novels, each tied to her own experiences.  THE BOOKSHOP (1978), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, concerns a struggling store in a fictional East Anglian town.  Set in 1959, it includes as a pivotal event the shop's decision to stock "Lolita".  Fitzgerald won the 1979 Booker Prize with OFFSHORE, a novel set among houseboat residents in Battersea in 1961.  HUMAN VOICES (1980) fictionalises wartime life at the BBC, while AT FREDDIE'S (1982) depicts life at a drama school.

These were followed by a biography of the poet Charlotte Mew and a series of novels with a variety of historical settings.  The first was INNOCENCE (1986), a romance between the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat and a doctor from a southern Communist family set in 1950s Florence, Italy.  THE BEGINNING OF SPRING (1988) examines the world just before the Russian Revolution through the family and work troubles of a British businessman born and raised in Russia.  THE GATE OF ANGELS (1990), about a young Cambridge physicist who falls in love with a nursing trainee after a bicycle accident, is set in 1912, when physics was about to enter its own revolutionary period.

Fitzgerald's final novel, THE BLUE FLOWER (1995), centres on the 18th-century German poet and philosopher Novalis and his love for what is portrayed as an ordinary child.  It won the National Book Critics Circle Award 1997 and has been called her masterpiece.

A collection of Fitzgerald's short stories, THE MEANS OF ESCAPE (2000), and a volume of her essays, reviews and commentaries, A HOUSE OF AIR (2003), were published posthumously.  In 2013 the first full biography of Fitzgerald appeared: Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee, also included in this collection.


The following books are in ePub format:

== NOVELS ==

* At Freddie's (Fourth Estate, 2013)
* The Beginning of Spring (Mariner, 2015)
* The Blue Flower (Mariner, 2014)
* The Bookshop (Mariner, 2015)
* The Gate of Angels (Mariner, 2015)
* The Golden Child (Fourth Estate, 2014)
* Human Voices (Fourth Estate, 2014)
* Innocence (Fourth Estate, 2013)
* Offshore (Fourth Estate, 2013)

== SHORT STORIES ==

* The Means of Escape (HarperPress, 2001)

== BIOGRAPHIES ==

* Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (Fourth Estate, 2014)
* Edward Burne-Jones (Fourth Estate, 2014)
* The Knox Brothers (Fourth Estate, 2002)

== ESSAYS & REVIEWS ==

* A House of Air [ed. Dooley et al.] (Harper Perennial, 2005)

== LETTERS ==

* So I Have Thought of You: Letters [ed. Dooley] (Fourth Estate, 2008)


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