[In the following excerpt, Pritchard lauds Fitzgerald’s Gate of Angels as a “delightful entertainment.”]

For some reason I’ve failed to read Penelope Fitzgerald, thus know her only by the latest The Gate of Angels. It is a delightful entertainment, set in 1912 in a mythical Cambridge college, St. Angelicus, where Fred Fairly is a junior fellow, and in London, where Daisy Saunders is a nurse at Blackfriars Hospital. The novel charts their meeting, separation, and coming together again; but its real interest is the offbeat sensibility of Penelope Fitzgerald who ranks right up there with the eccentric English fictionists of this century. The time period is perfect Ivy Compton-Burnett; the dialogue sometimes sounds straight out of Evelyn Waugh, as when Fred visits his family at the Rectory (by train to Blow Halt with a stop at Bishop’s Leaze), is greeted by two dogs named Sandford and Merton, and embraced by his little sister Julia:

“Is there anything to eat?” Fred asked.

“There’s some rook pie and sago pudding left over for tonight. They’re very nasty, but you remember that we’re poor and have to eat nasty things.”

One recalls William Boot’s ancestral home at Boot Magna (nearest rail stop, Boot Magna Halt) and its collection of lovable antiquities in Waugh’s Scoop. Fitzgerald is a performer: when Daisy tries to convince the wife of a Cambridge scholar named Wrayburn to take her on as hired help, Mrs. Wrayburn (who spent four action-packed years at Newnham) looks down at the sink, “loaded down with all that was necessary when a husband had his daily meals at the house”:

Like most of her friends, she had prayed not to marry a clergyman, a general practitioner, or a university lecturer without a fellowship. All these (unlike the Army or the Bar) were professions that meant luncheon at home, so that every day (in addition to cups, plates and dishes) demanded toast-racks, egg-cups, egg-cosies, hot water jugs, hot milk strainers, tea-strainers, coffee-strainers, bone egg-spoons, sugar-tongs, mustard pots manufactured of blue glass inside…

It continues for thirty-five or more items without which luncheon is inconceivable, concluding with “compotiers, ramekins, pipkins, cruets, pots,” most of which items we assume are “in the sink at the moment, waiting, in mute reproach, to be washed and dried.” You get the picture: an essential English wit.