“At teatime next day a little girl of ten years old, very pale, very thin and remarkably fair, presented herself at the Old House. Christine and Florence strike up an unlikely and ultimately protective partnership. However she has a natural affinity to organisation and is in many ways mature beyond her years. Christine dislikes books, in fact she only reads The Bunty. To help her with the day to day running of the shop Florence takes on 10 1/2 year old Christine. “The town itself was an island between sea and river, muttering and drawing into itself as soon as it felt the cold” The insular nature of Hardborough is summed up perfectly here. She is met with open opposition and finds herself in a quiet tug of war with the local residents as she attempts to establish the shop as part of the fabric of the town. It was first published in 1978 when it was nominated for the Booker prize and continues to feel fresh and relevant 37 years later.Įssentially this is the story of Florence Green and her attempt to open a book shop in the inward looking East Anglian Coastal town of Hardborough. This is a brief 156 page novel (perhaps that makes it a novella?) packed full of good things.
Other than being aware of the author’s name I confess complete ignorance to Penelope Fitzgerald prior to reading this gloriously understated little book. See /privacy for more information.I picked up this attractive book in a recent visit to a second hand bookshop. Introduced by Sam Kinchin-Smith, the LRB's Head of Special Projects.
Lee is in conversation with Susannah Clapp, who worked on many of her LRB pieces, and has described her as an ideal contributor who needed no ‘handling’: ‘She wrote to length, she wrote to time, she wrote without fuss, she wrote a lot’ – on subjects ranging from Alain-Fournier to Adrian Mole, Stevie Smith to Wild Swans – ‘always with a steady brilliance.’ But as Hermione Lee, her biographer, writes in the introduction to the LRB’s new selection of Fitzgerald’s writing for the paper, ‘though she started publishing biography and fiction late in life … she was an old hand as a literary journalist.’ It is this Fitzgerald, ‘a reviewer, a writer of introductions, a literary judge, and a speaker on panels and at literary festivals’, who is the subject of this special event to mark the publication of the LRB’s latest Selections volume. The Penelope Fitzgerald who wrote The Bookshop, Offshore and The Blue Flower is far too celebrated – as the greatest novelist of her time, according to Julian Barnes, and many others – to be in need of a revival.
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