
Her first five novels are all set in England, in the present or the recent past. She had written a couple of biographies and, as she amiably stresses in biographical notesĪnd interviews, brought up three children. She had a varied professional life before she took up novels.

Prize in England, and her ''Offshore'' won the prize in 1979.

Since then, three of her nine novels have been short-listed for the Booker Penelope Fitzgerald uses fiction to examine an 18th-century German poet and his doomed love for a 12-year-old girlĮnelope FITZGERALD'S first novel was published in 1977, when she was already 60.

Ap'Nonsense Is Only Another Language' By MICHAEL HOFMANN
