2 - Biographies

Summary

Penelope Fitzgerald published three group biographies – Edward Burne-Jones (1975), The Knox Brothers (1977) and Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984) – and began, but eventually gave up, a life of the novelist L. P. Hartley. Over six decades she also reviewed and wrote introductions for numerous writers’ lives, ranging from canonical figures such as S. T. Coleridge, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to less well-remembered novelists, poets and artists such as Margaret Oliphant, John Lehmann and C. R. Ashbee. Fitzgerald believed from the beginning that the biographer's attitude to her subject should be one of love and respect. In 1945 she reviewed Edwin Honig's Garcia Lorca for Punch, observing: ‘Clearly he loved his subject, this side idolatry, and there is no better basis for biography.’ More than thirty years later, by then an accomplished biographer in her own right, she still felt the same: ‘A primary biography by people who know the subject and are really fond of him or her is a protection, I think.’ She knew just how demanding a biographer's task could be, and towards the end of her life doubted that she still had the energy and perseverance required. Yet Fitzgerald never lost her belief that biography could achieve a profound and intimate understanding of its subject: ‘It seems to me that (particularly if you have the letters, and if you knew the subject yourself or can get hold of someone who knew the subject) you can know him or her at least as well as anyone you meet in real life.’ Fitzgerald's biographies (and especially The Knox Brothers) provide important clues to the distinctive sensibility we find in her novels. In particular, Fitzgerald's biographies show that no one can be understood without taking his or her family, friends and colleagues into consideration. The same view holds in Fitzgerald's novels, where joy, pain and everything in between depend almost wholly on the ties that bind.

EDWARD BURNE-JONES (1975)

Fitzgerald's first biography, about the lives and work of the Victorian artists and craftsmen Edward Burne-Jones (‘Ned’) and William Morris (‘Top’), and Ned's wife, Georgiana Burne-Jones (‘Georgie’), arose from her longstanding fascination with the art, culture and social worlds of mid-nineteenth-century England.