Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop is on any reckoning a marvellously piercing fiction. It is (of course) about a woman's resilience under stress. And the duress Florence Green is put under when she opens a bookshop in an islanded Suffolk seaside place is all the more harrowing because of its neighbourly, gossipy ordinariness, its roots in the well-intentioned but rival cultural aspirations of the genteel Mrs Gamart, the General's wife. What happens is sharply localized.

[There] are the small circumstances that give rise naturally to a Hardy-like gothic, complete with a rapping poltergeist, and to a fiction where character inevitably comes to "characters". And Penelope Fitzgerald's resources of odd people are impressively rich.

Further, and more seriously still, The Bookshop—fiercely, rousingly moral—analyses the operations of power. Mrs Gamart wants Florence's Old House bookshop for an Arts Centre and, frustrated, hectors and schemes until by dint of solicitors and connections and relations in government she finally winkles Florence out. There is a hostile class element in this—Mrs Gamart exploits the county network she's part of—but it's not simplistically analysed….

Above all, the story's refusal of sentiment will not let Florence off unblameable. She is a fighter, and her own belligerence draws Mrs Gamart's fire. More, Florence's innocence about Lolita, sales of which put her shop on the map and fuel local angers and envies, is made sharply unnerving. For tapping the powers of literature so naively—she has not read the book, does not know what she is selling, and too lightly quotes the old Everyman slogan about a good book being precious life blood, and so on—begins to look almost as dangerous as Mrs Gamart's wiles or Milo's supineness…. And though Florence's defeat leaves Mrs Gamart victorious in the field, her retirement to London broke, homeless, carless, bookshopless, has the kind of grimly ironic aptness for which this fetchingly orchestrated, indeed this "beautiful and blest nouvelle", has not left us entirely unprepared.