![]() She spent her childhood in hyper-literary Hampstead, where poets and painters walked the streets, and in a family where, she would write, “everyone was publishing, or about to publish, something.” Her father’s galley proofs served as the household writing paper. Her father hailed from an intensely clever clan that Fitzgerald would immortalize he became the editor of Punch. If anything she grew up steeped in literature. ![]() Which is but one reason to be grateful that the life of that elusive, original miracle-worker, the English novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, falls to Hermione Lee, author of masterly lives of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, all written at an age before which her newest subject had begun to publish.įitzgerald was not born to lateness. Indeed there could be: That would be the late bloomer, the great writer who publishes her first book at 58, to become famous at 80. Could there be anything worse than Dashiell Hammett’s three decades of writer’s block? ![]() Then there is the subject who leaves his biographer to flounder with years to go. ![]() They are only slightly less discourteous than the diary-destroyers, though neither holds a candle to the author of the matchless (and accurate) memoir. ![]() Among the worst offenders may be the stoic and the selfless. )Īll biographical subjects misbehave every biographical subject misbehaves in his own way. (This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2014. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |