The last Victorian.

The Afterlife

Essays and Criticism

Penelope Fitzgerald Edited by Terence Dooley with Christopher Carduff and Mandy Kirkby

Counterpoint, $25, 432 pp

Octogenarian Penelope Fitzgerald, full-length and full-face; stares in wry scrutiny from the jacket of The Afterlife. The effect is unnerving. The title itself proclaims that this is a posthumous collection of the English novelist's reviews, articles, and lectures--all the more reason to shiver a bit when fixed by the eyes on the cover photograph. Most of these pieces were written within the last fifteen years of her life; they speak from the other side of the grave in marvelous refutation of the debility of aging.

Fitzgerald died at eighty-three, just over three years ago. She achieved fame as a novelist late in her life, her career starting when she was well into her fifties. It culminated, in terms of her reputation in this country, with a National Book Critics Circle Award for her historical novel, The Blue Flower, an account of the German Romantic poet, Novalis. (The earlier Off Shore won Britain's Booker Prize in 1979.) She was also the quirky biographer of Edward Burne-Jones, Charlotte Mew, and the Knox brothers, among whom were Catholic apologist Fr. Ronald Knox and the editor of Punch, Evoe, her father. She had within living memory strong connections with the late Victorian world; not surprisingly, she reviewed many biographies, collections of letters, and reprinted editions of Victorian and Edwardian authors. She writes with a firsthand knowledge of that world and speaks with real authority on William Morris and his circle.

This collection also gives us many assessments of women writers, some of whom Fitzgerald knew as friends or acquaintances. She recalls being put off by Dorothy Sayers's comments at her Oxford college high table, remembering the writer as "austere, remote, almost cubical." Whatever the source, firsthand experience or the accumulated understanding that stems from years of the writer's life, Fitzgerald amply justifies that assured and ironic smile that graces the cover of this book.

What she has to say about the Victorians, or Bloomsbury, Yates, the Pre-Raphaelites, or more modern writers has at times an oracular quality. On Evelyn Waugh, she is brutal: "During the second half of his life [he] became the victim of his own game, not of Let's Pretend, but of Let's Pretend to Pretend." And of Stevie Smith, the English poet who died in 1971, she comments: "[Smith] said that she was straightforward but not simple, which is a version of waving but not drowning. She presented to the world the face that is invented when reticence goes over to attack and becomes mystification." Those sentences could as easily appear in one of Fitzgerald's novels, and that acute ability to render character is a strength in a critic and reviewer. The pages of The Afterlife offer a dizzying spread of insights into authors as diverse and separated in time as Jane Austen, C. S. Lewis, and Amy Tan. She can as easily open up what were dusty worlds of "lesser lights" of the last century (again drawing on her personal acquaintance with the writers) as comment with a novelist's understanding on formal artistic challenges and the response of her contemporaries. There is little Fitzgerald says that is not worth reading.

Fitzgerald's other evident strength is her own experience as a biographer. A cut-and-paste culling of her comments about the task of the biographer could provide a tract for anyone who cared to write a "life of ...": "The biographer is bound by facts, but must go ahead, like the miner's canary, to test the air for falseness and out-of-date conventions."

"Reading a good biography means thinking of unfulfilled conditionals."

"The years of success are the biographer's nightmare. Friends and patrons begin to crowd the page."

"The biographer has not so much to reconstruct her [Charlotte Mew's] life as to account for what life did to her."

The last part of The Afterlife is conceivably the most inviting: autobiographical accounts and essays or assertions about the novelist's tasks. The number of marginal tick marks I made increases dramatically, especially as Fitzgerald's recollections of her childhood and married life open out to incidents that she turned into fiction. She offers bald statements about her program as a novelist, and in "Last Words" she matter-of-factly contemplates her own death. Still, the greater memorial lies in the pages that precede these: the work in words she has done as reviewer and essayist; the honest care and respect she pays to those who made their living by the writer's trade. (She asserts, in effect, with Dr. Johnson that only a blockhead does not write to earn money!) Yet it is only fair to let Fitzgerald say overtly what she took on as a writer of fiction:

  I have remained true to my deepest convictions--I mean to the courage
  of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong,
  and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I
  have done my best to treat as a comedy, for otherwise how can we
  manage to bear it?

We can take her at her word: she accepted this burden as a writer.

Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.