[In the following excerpt, Flower states that The Bookshop is “clearly one of [Fitzgerald’s] best.”]

Another backward glance must be made at the amazing career of Penelope Fitzgerald, who has published nine superb novels in England since 1977, when she was sixty-one. Although Offshore won the Booker Prize in 1979 and three other works of hers were short-listed for it, Fitzgerald’s novels are hard to find in this country, except for The Blue Flower (1996) and The Bookshop (1978),¹ both recently reissued in paperback. The Bookshop is Fitzgerald’s second novel, and clearly one of her best. Its protagonist, kindhearted Florence Green, attempts to run a bookshop in her soggy little East-Anglian village. But Hardborough discovers, in its provincial wisdom, that it does not want a bookshop, neither one that sells new fiction like Lolita (the date is 1959) or one that sells Every Man His Own Mechanic. Florence has spent ten years in this place, after her husband’s death, trying to survive, “wanting to make it clear to herself, and possibly to others, that she existed in her own right.” But everyone in the community cooperates, most of them without guile or intention, to defeat her purposes. Her clear intelligence, practicality, and generosity do her, in the long run, no good at all. The whole story seems wonderfully amusing, from stern little Christine who comes in to help after school to the eccentric hermit Mr. Brundish who so awkwardly and honestly appreciates Florence’s worth. There is even an inconvenient ghost and an old horse with the bumbreezes. But the genial, winning details only make the end more agonizing. No wonder critics are saying reckless things, like “the finest British writer alive,” about Fitzgerald.

Note

1. The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald. Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin. ＄10.00p.