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“... able to name the figure that inspired it? Sixty years after Punch ran the poem, Knox’s daughter, Penelope Fitzgerald, published Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, in which she observed that her subject would always be an outsider. Twenty years ago Ian Hamilton wrote that Mew’s reputation ‘hangs by a thread’. Her Collected Poems and Prose has long been ...”

“... are ground, eyes are orbs, women are she-wolves.In her excellent introduction to Salem Chapel, Penelope Fitzgerald suggests that the novel’s excursion into melodrama was occasioned in part by an anxiety about sales figures, but also by a wish to broaden the character of Arthur Vincent, and give prominence to his ministerial perplexities. Mrs ...”

“... the Foreign Office’s request to broadcast nothing that might prejudice British-Soviet relations. Penelope Fitzgerald​ , who worked at Broadcasting House during the war, described the social and moral atmosphere of the corporation’s headquarters in notes she made for her novel Human Voices, published forty years later. Broadcasting House in wartime ...”

“... Knox’s 1929 translation of Herodas for the Loeb Classical Library. Knox’s brilliant niece Penelope Fitzgerald describes the outcome in The Knox Brothers with a sympathetic glee: The language of the Mimes is precious, with unpleasant affected archaisms, and an honest translation, it seemed to Dilly, must be the same. Cloistered in his study ...”

“... Although she had been an adolescent fan-letter writer – to Vincent Benét and to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was later to be one of the many writers hired and sacked on the script of the film – the admired ones’ sage abstention from answering taught her nothing. When Gone with the Wind was published, fan letters arrived in sacks which, troubling her ...”

“... by the first American client he showed it to. ‘Large Interior, Notting Hill’ (1998) Penelope Fitzgerald thought the world divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. Certainly it divides into controllers and controllees. A typical controllee is someone who is love-dependent; Freud was that once, and swore never to be so ...”

“... Mary McCarthy and V.S. Pritchett and William Empson and V.S. Naipaul and Angela Carter and Penelope Fitzgerald. (McCarthy was the subject of another life lesson. He and she once, at a party, got into a conversation about the negative reviews of their own books. ‘Well,’ Karl said, ‘it’s not necessarily so bad as all that. You might not see ...”

“... very painful to me because it shows how little in common they had and how cruel he was. It may, as Penelope Fitzgerald once suggested in this paper, say ‘a great deal for the Bensons that they made a go of an ill-assorted marriage, a brilliant, bizarre, self-centred family, and a career that reached the very summit’ (LRB, 18 June 1998). But it is not ...”

“... the position now open for a more experienced hand. Hermione Lee, then at work on her biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, was invited to be Miller’s successor, but had to decline, sparing herself no end of eventual aggravation.Into this vacancy the editor and biographer James Atlas tentatively ventured. He had made his name with a Life of Delmore Schwartz ...”

“... comes to Ithaca and accidentally kills him with an arrow made from the sting of a sting-ray, Penelope marries Telegonus, Telemachus marries Circe and they all live happily ever after. These poems seem to have been composed later, in response to the success of the Homeric epics, to fill in the gaps that Homer had left, and some of it – the Telegonia ...”

“... the unknown with the scarred remnants of his people, who addresses our fortunes. It is not cunning Penelope but outraged Dido who enacts perceptions, long overdue, of the victimisation of women. I would conjecture that the current climate is more one of at-homeness in the Aeneid than in the Iliad (Simone Weil’s attempt to misread Homer’s fierce ...”

“... World War One he was a Princeton undergraduate (as I was almost fifty years later) with F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop, at a time of what seems now like relatively uncomplicated Wasp hegemony there and in the arts generally. His ties with that university remained deep, not only through his literary friends, but also through Christian Gauss, the ...”

“... adjustments to the desired and perfect type? I saw the Birmingham exhibition just after reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s Edward Burne-Jones, a wonderfully good biography. Burne-Jones’s relationships with the young women who appear in the paintings in various mythical guises, with his clients (he didn’t need very many but they had to be rich and ...”

“... all its solidity, but the past wasn’t solid while it was happening. Another tradition, of which Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower is the assuming apotheosis, sees research not as a chore or an obsession but as a sap that can be made to flow through every capillary of the text. Thomson’s prose has a striking lightness of texture, even when he ...”