The Bookshop, The Gate Of Angels And The Blue Flower

Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, emerged late in life as one of the most remarkable English writers of the last century. The three novels in this volume all display her characteristic wit, intellectual breadth and narrative brilliance, applied to the different traditional forms into which she breathed new life.

The Bookshop is a contemporary comedy of manners, set in a provincial town. When Florence Green, a ‘small, wispy and wiry woman’ decides to open a bookshop in the small Suffolk town of Hardborough she has no idea of the force of opposition that will ensue. In attempting to challenge a seemingly sleepy and indeterminate status quo, in her own  quiet way, Florence uncovers an undercurrent of tenacious resentment against her small project. The complex webs of small-town community close in around her as those with minor influence seek to hold sway.

In The Gate of Angels romance is combined with the novel of ideas. It is 1912, and at Cambridge University the modern age is knocking at the gate. Fred Fairly, a Junior Fellow at the college of St Angelicus, where for centuries no female, not even a pussy cat, has been allowed to set foot, lectures in physics. Science, he is certain, will explain everything. Until into Fred’s orderly life come Daisy. Fred is smitten. Why have I met her? he wonders. How can I tell if she’s quite what she seems? Fred is a scientist. To him the truth should be everything. But even scientists make mistakes.

The Blue Flower revitalizes historical drama in a study of the eighteenth-century German writer Novalis.

Fitzgerald being the genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched conceptual context, each novel conjures up a different world in a few vivid pages which remain etched on the memory.