![]() ![]() ![]() I remember the vertiginous thrill of realizing, a good 50 pages into my first reading of Human Voices, that it wasn't the delicate comedy-of-manners I'd taken it for, but something far deeper and altogether stranger. Unlike Muriel Spark (with whom she shares a fine line in irony, and a surprising number of biographical details), Fitzgerald's greatness doesn't announce itself within a few sentences, but creeps up on you slowly, over the course of a novel. Her work is characterized by a subtle wit, an unflagging sympathy for her characters, and a sphinx-like reticence. ![]() In the eight years since her death, an increasing number of readers - including AS Byatt, Frank Kermode and Hermione Lee - have begun speaking of her as the greatest English novelist of recent decades.Īll Fitzgerald's books are refreshingly short (the longest, Innocence, running to just 220 pages in my paperback edition), but she crammed into them an astonishing amount of comedy, wisdom and pathos. She won the Booker (for Offshore), and became the first non-American to win the National Book Critics' Circle award (for The Blue Flower, which many consider her masterpiece). Despite a late start (she began writing her first novel when she was almost 60, composing it as a diversion for her dying husband), she gained immense popular and critical acclaim during the last 20 years of her life. Fitzgerald was a wonderful writer, and since her death in 2000 her reputation has continued to soar. ![]()
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