PENELOPE FITZGERALD: A Life, by Hermione Lee. Knopf, 488 pp., $35. Hermione Lee's sensitive, respectful biography traces the life of a woman as elusive and enigmatic as her fiction. Coming into public ...

British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald (“The Blue Flower”) was called by A.S. Byatt “one of the best novelists of my lifetime,” and there are plenty of readers — myself included — who would agree.

In 1980, a relative unknown named Penelope Fitzgerald surprised the London literary establishment by getting shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for her second novel, The Bookshop. The author—61, ...

The National BookCritics Circle Awards were opened to non-American writers for the first time in 1997. That year the English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald won for “The Blue Flower,” a short historical ...

Years ago, Mary-Beth Hughes, the author of the novel The Loved Ones, studied dance at the studio of the pioneering choreographer Merce Cunningham. The unorthodox dancing methods Hughes learned were a ...