A House of Air. Hermione Lee

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       INTRODUCTION by Hermione Lee

      Because Penelope Fitzgerald’s genius as a writer of fiction lay so much in reticence, quietness, and self-obliteration, her admirers will come to her posthumously collected nonfiction with intense curiosity, searching for her likes and dislikes, her preferences and opinions and feelings, in these wonderfully sympathetic, curious, and knowledgeable pieces on writing, art, craft, places, history, and biography. And, in a generous selection of twenty years’ worth of essays and reviews, we do find (especially in the last section, on ‘Life and Letters’) Fitzgerald’s point of view very plainly set out. She believed, as a novelist, that (as she said to me in an interview in 1997) ‘you should make it clear where you stand.’ Here, speaking of E. M. Delafield, she asks: ‘What is the use of an impartial novelist?’ She is forthright and candid here about her moral position in her novels: ‘I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the СКАЧАТЬ