Backlisted - Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

Penelope Fitzgerald's fourth novel Human Voices (1980) is set at the BBC during the early months of the Second World War. Joining John and Andy to discuss the book, and Penelope Fitzgerald's life and work, are publisher and editor George Morley and writer and critic Lucy Scholes. Other books under discussion include Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss and The Good Immigrant USA edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)5'56 - The Good Immigrant USA by Chimene Suleyman and Nikesh Shukla09'47 - 17'47 - Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two freshly cracked eggs any way you like them. Three strips of naturally smoked bacon and a side of toast. Only $6 at A&W's in Ontario. Experience A&W's classic breakfast on now. Dine-in only until 11 a.m. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills.

And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights. There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and T-Rex equipment. But like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet

Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Yeah, so last Saturday at the Hot Tin in Faddesham, which is a new arts venue in Kent down the road from me, they asked me to host an event with the filmmaker Sarah Wood and the novelist Ali Smith. And at this event, which was really, really good, Ali read from Spring.

And so it's appropriate because we're doing Penelope Fitzgerald, I can say with accuracy that Ali Smith read the beginning of Spring. You've been working on that all week. That's all I've got. That's all I've got for this episode. I've got nothing else. So Ali read the opening chapter and she said to the audience before she started, how do you all feel about me reading something

with quite a lot of invective? I'm trying to capture the feeling of what it's like to be alive in Britain just before Brexit. That's what I'm trying to get in this chapter. Of course, the audience were up for instance she and she did a i don't know maybe 10 minute reading of this torrent of abuse and anxiety and uh discontent which on the page would have been one thing and will be one thing and you And we're going to get to read that in about a month's time. But the performance that she did of it was just out of this world good.

I've never seen Ali Smith read before. And she really finds the internal rhythm of the prose and pushes that forward. So it was really like a performance piece. It sounded amazing. Some writers, you know, some can read their own work well and pushes that forward. So it was really like a performance piece. It sounded amazing. Some writers, you know, some can read their own work well and others can't, but I've seen her read a couple of times. She's amazing. Sometimes I think it makes sense of the work in a way

that you wouldn't imagine reading aloud would, but it just does. A bit like the old Elizabeth Smart routine last podcast. Andy and I are going to have words about Elizabeth Smart. Don't worry. Hey,'s mind. Don't worry. Hey, come on. Don't worry. You know, I said, you know,

Rachel was brilliant. It was much better to let somebody who loves it talk about it. Well, that's the thing. Including you, George. I saw someone on the tube two days ago and I nearly papshotted her because she was reading it

on the Northern Line and I thought of you. Did you? By Tottenham Court Road I sat down. Yeah, yeah. We've all done that. Yeah, always. Hello and welcome to Backlisted,

the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you join us as we approach Broadcasting House in London, its prow sailing out into Portland Place, its perimeter lagged with sandbags against the bombs which will soon start to fall, its corridors alive with young and anxious people determined to broadcast the truth to a dark and expectant world. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound,

the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Joining us today are George Morley. Hello. Afternoon. Hello, George. George Morley. Hello. Afternoon. Hello George. George Morley. Hello John. Non-fiction editorial director at Picador but who cut her teeth as editorial assistant to Peter Carson who was then editor-in-chief of Penguin where she says she learned more in two years than she had in three at university or since. This is true. After Penguin she became a commissioning editor at Transworld, then joined Macmillan as non-fiction

editorial director in 1994. So, have you done 25 years? I've done 25 years penal servitude in the course of publishing, yes. In many different buildings. Yes. Her list focuses on serious non-fiction. Yes. Yes.

I'm a British non-fiction publisher, what can I tell you? It's the war. Mostly history and historical biography with occasional forays into narrative non-fiction and memoir. The authors she has worked with include, in no particular order, Adam Hochschild. Yes, King Leopold's Ghost, one of the best books ever written. Michael Burley, Robert Service, David Olisoga, Robert Saviano, John Krakauer, Jane Glover, Judith Mackrell and

Catherine Nixie and most recently she's worked with David Knott, the trauma surgeon whose book War Doctor is A, a good deed in a naughty world and B, seems to be doing quite well. It is doing quite well, yes. You've got number one? Yes. Amazing. Yes, there was swearing in the office. And also joining us, we're very pleased to welcome back Lucy Scholes.

Hello. Hello, Lucy. Pleased to be back. We're delighted to welcome you back to Backlisted. Lucy was the guest on one of our earliest and most important episodes when she introduced us to the joys of Barbara Cummings. Then she returned for one of our middle and most important episodes where we all agreed with one another about Anita Bruckner.

And now she's back. She's back to do the travel. Exactly. Third time's a charm. Lucy writes about books, film and art for the Financial Times, the New York Review Daily, the New York Times Book Review, and Granter, among other publications. She is the managing editor of the new literary magazine,

The Second Shelf, rare books and words by women affiliated to the bookshop of the same name. Exactly. And she writes a monthly column for the Paris Review about out of print and forgotten books that deserve to be neither of those things. So she is core backlisting. Thank you, Lucy. I've been listening since the beginning. Yeah. I've been listening since the beginning. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The book that George and Lucy are here to talk about today is Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald, her fourth novel, first published in 1980 by William Collins when she was in her mid-60s. But before we get on to Penelope Fitzgerald and Human Voices, let me ask John, John, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading this week The Good Imm USA um for all kinds of reasons that was the launch party of the book last night which was one of the jolliest and loveliest evenings I've been to we obviously

published the original good immigrant uh two years ago nearly three years ago and it kind of I think it did genuinely change publishing and this, and indeed Charmaine Lovegrove, who was very, very complimentary about the original volume, said dialogue books which are publishing the second volume here and in the US wouldn't have happened without the sort of breakthrough. Do you just want to remind people what the Good Immigrant is and what? It was a collection of essays by people

who were first- to second-generation immigrants to the UK, edited by Nicker Shukla. He had talked to publishers about doing something similar but couldn't get any interest. So we said, well, in fact, it was edited by Rachel. They, I think, cooked it up on a New Writing North conference and said, let's just put it on the site, see what happens. It got funded in three days. Huge thanks to J.K. Rowling who put in five thousand pounds but we've now sold over a hundred thousand copies and it goes on it's sort of become a backlist staple i get a particular thrill when i go into the banbury waterstones formerly in ottica's and

see it's on the front table i mean it's brilliant so this is obviously this is good immigrant usa i have to say it's beautifully done been It's been really well published. Yes, that is really nice. It's 26 essays, very much the same, non-fiction essays, from obviously the breadth of kind of immigration into America is even broader, Irish, Jewish, Korean, African, South Asian, Persian, Iranian. Again, the reason I think The Good Immigrant worked is it was just full of energy. They were very, very, very. Again, the reason I think The Good Immigrant worked is it was just

full of energy. There were very, very, very strong essays and this has done it again. There are some writers who people will be familiar with. Yeah, give us a run there. There's Toju Cole, there's Alexander Chee, there's Chigotsu Yobiyama, who's short for the man booker. But again

the thing that I loved about it was there are lots of writers I've never heard of. Writers from Latin America I'd loved about it was there are lots of writers I've never heard of. Writers from Latin America I'd never heard of. Writers from South Asia I'd never heard of. I had heard of one, I'll give you a tiny little sort of flavour. Beautiful essay. It's edited, I should say, by Nikesh again and by Shemen Suleiman. She is Turkish-English and now lives in Brooklyn.

So she was the kind of lead editor on it. It's a great, great collection. And with the shadow of Charlottesville and Trump and all the horror that's going on in the most really important book, I think. But I'll give you just a little flavor. This is from the brilliant essay by the filmmaker, Yann Demange. And he ends it like this. I know firsthand the importance of telling the stories of people who are underrepresented, particularly during a time when the discourse

is becoming increasingly black and white, as the capacity for empathy towards people deemed other to one's own tribe gets more diluted. There is a responsibility to tell stories that engage them, whatever their tribe. Fuck being judgmental or self-righteous. There's too much of that going around right now. That's sprinkled with a little too much earnestness. It's nauseating. Who are we to judge? People's lives are complicated after all. It's by digging deep into that complexity

that we find the universality in their experience. There's no universality without specificity. So I'll continue to explore outsiders and storytelling in the hope it may someday unlock something for me or lead to some sort of inner peace. And I'll continue giving my short answer to the question, where are you from? Because as you can see, the alternative answer can go on for fucking ever in it. It's really good. It's a nice essay. They're all good. I mean, so I'm really, I'd have to say it was it to say it was a really very rare that you get a genuinely joyous occasion in the book industry. So that's out now.

It's out literally today. Andy, what have you been reading? Okay, so I've been reading the long-listed for the Bailey's Prize short novel Ghostwall by Sarah Moss. And in keeping with the tradition of the already mentioned by Grand Central Station, I sat down and wept, where you ask me what I've been reading and I get other people to talk about it.

I'm going to do that with Ghostfall. The difference is that I really love Ghostfall. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. I'm just going to tell listeners what the novel is about by reading you the extremely on point blurb on the dust jacket teenage sylvie and her parents are living in a hut in northumberland as an exercise in experimental archaeology her father is a difficult man obsessed with imagining and enacting the harshness of iron age life haunting sylvie's narrative is the story of a bog girl,

a young woman sacrificed by those closest to her, and the landscape both keeps and reveals the secrets of past violence and ritual as the summer builds to its harrowing climax. Very good, very good blurb. Before I ask the rest of you about it, I would like to say, the thing about this book is you can read it in one sitting, probably take you a couple of hours to read it. It's so full of things. I can't quite believe how she's managed to fill it up with so many resonances and relevancies. And also, John,

it really reminded me of former backlisted subject, Red Shift. it's not as fragmented as red shift by alan garner but it has a similar relationship between echoing the past things that happened several thousand years ago or hundred years ago and things that happening right now so that's what i thought about it i thought it was absolutely terrific i think i was the last person at this table to read the book because nikki you read this didn't you yeah you said on the last person at this table to read the book because Nikki, you read this, didn't you? Yeah. You said on the last episode that you read it. I thought it was staggering. I really, really, so inventive. That's why I came away

thinking, aren't people clever? Particularly Sarah Mott. These writers. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And George, you like this as well. I think it's fantastic. And actually it's funny you said Alangana because when you were talking I was thinking it reminded me of The Owl owl service which is one of our greatest books and again it's a young woman on the cusp of something and some awful lot of other stuff is going to go down

and you don't ever know quite where it's going to go and the ending is just extraordinary this quote on the back from jesse burton i have never read a novel this slender that holds inside it quite so much actually that's perfectly fair i mean yeah really don't you think oh yeah i think that's one of its great skills as an all i mean that you say it packs so much in yet it's nothing i mean it's so slim you would think you know nothing of it but i think she's a wonderful writer and i think she's one of those writers i mean i've said this before and i'm not the only person to say this but I think the fact that she hasn't made a book a long list by this point is sort of astonishing like I don't know why she gets

overlooked in that way and I think this in particular seemed to I mean I'm a fan of all her work I think I would suggest everyone go and read her back catalogue but Ghost Wall is a kind of step up I think. Oh it's transformative. Yeah it's really astonishing. And you interviewed her didn't you? I did I did an event with her in the autumn at Waterstones on Gower Street and she was absolutely fascinating from start to finish the most fascinating thing she said that had the audience in absolute kind of awe was that she just sort of let slip at one point in the conversation that she writes each novel twice and she writes a whole full draft of it and then she deletes it and starts again.

And this is the response that the entire audience had. And I was sort of flabbergasted and became very unprofessional. But please tell you have it in your trash can or something like this. But she said no and she never looks back at it and she thinks that back at it. And she thinks that she gets everything that doesn't work out in the first draft. And that's possibly partly why the second draft is so good. But what have you missed, Big?

Two interesting things about that. One is Tim O'Grady, wonderful Irish-American writer, he gave his manuscript, gave it to a courier to take to his publisher, and it never arrived. So he had to rewrite it from scratch. And I said to him, was the second version better? He said, no, it was much, much worse. There was so much I couldn't remember.

But the other thing was Chatwin used to say this, that he could always tell if somebody had written a book on a word processor because the act of writing a draft, having pages and having to retype or rewrite, makes you edit in a different way. And it makes the flow better. I'm sure that's not really true. But bloody hell, that's extraordinary. I could never, I mean, I'd just never do the second one. But I can see the, you know, I can see. It's a good excuse though, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. I can see the theory that you create a memory of the thing that you wrote. Oh, yes. But I think you have to be so confident in that you will remember the good things. You're going to write a palimpsest of the first book, aren't you? Yes. Because you have literally erased it. Yes.

But it's quite a bold thing to do. Exactly. It's the boldness of it. Is that why her second book's quite small? I don't think, well, not. The first version of this was 500 pages. This is the shortest of all her books. Such a weird way.

But amazing, I mean, I'm in awe. Charles Carlyle, Shade, eat your heart out. I do think it's one of the things now is that people aren't, a lot of writers aren't really prepared to redraft. Chatwin had a point. Yeah. Because I know, I mean, I've been an editor for 30 years and books are longer and they're too long.

Too long. There's only so much you can cut as an editor. Yeah. You know who writes multiple drafts of his novels, don't you? And we're going to be hearing from him later on, everybody, so be ready. Geoffrey Archer. He does.

He writes in longhand. Can I tell a story that I'm sure Peter Strauss told me? I may have misremembered it over the years, but he was editing a bit with Geoffrey Archer, which I can't remember. No, he never was. It's already, the story is already dead. But it was something about him taking his hands off the wheel when he was riding a motorcycle that he just decided to leave in the text

to see if anybody noticed, but nobody ever did. So I'm sure I've misremembered that, Dan, but I've always thought that would be fun to do, to actually leave howling errors in a writer's word and see if anybody ever noticed. Well, as you know from my close study of the da vinci code by dan brown don't start me on the da vinci no but i felt quite sorry for dan brown because the wikipedia page of errors in the da vinci code is so huge because clearly nobody authorial or editorial

went through it checking to see if there were any mistakes in it. So I bet they do now. I bet they're very careful now anyway. It's one of the only books I actually made marginal notes in since I stopped being a student because I was so angry. Yeah, I love that. It's that Dan Brown story about him hanging upside down when he has writer's block, kind of like a bat,

so you get the blood rushing through his head. Dislodge those ideas. Yeah. Bajent and League tried to prove that in fact he'd written their Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The idea of suing somebody for something that is essentially, to nip something that is essentially a fiction. The whole thing was demented.

The whole of QI can be boiled down to Eddie Izzard, who on the pilot of the show, when somebody was saying, what was King Arthur's lance called? Which turned out to be, I can't even remember now, it was something like Keith. Keith. So he said, this is true facts about a myth. That's what we're talking about here.

And Stephen said, yes, absolutely, Eddie. That's indeed true facts about a myth. There you go. So we should probably... Let's crack on. Yeah. Hey, let's pick this up again. Two freshly cracked eggs any way you like them.

Three strips of naturally smoked bacon and a side of toast. Only $6 at A&W's in Ontario. Experience A&W's classic breakfast on now. Dine-in only until 11 a.m. Wherever you're going, you better believe American Express will be right there with you. Heading for adventure? We'll help you breeze through security. Meeting friends a world away? You can use your travel credit. Squeezing every drop out of the last day? How about a 4 p.m. late checkout?

Just need a nice place to settle in? Enjoy your room upgrade. Wherever you go, we'll go together. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. So we're gathered together to talk about Penelope Fitzgerald. And before we start talking about human voices, but one of the things I really love about Penelope Fitzgerald now I've read Hermione Lee's biography is that Penelope Fitzgerald really liked watching TV that's one of the things that comes through loud and clear she's she was a big fan of settling down in front of the telly so we're going to start with a clip of Penelope Fitzgerald her work has been adapted for film this book we're talking about today, Human Voices, is currently being adapted for BBC TV.

And she was on TV just a couple of weeks ago, thus. And your name is? Keshava Goha. Your occupation? Postgraduate student. And your chosen subject? The novels of Penelope Fitzgerald. Two minutes starting now.

The gold-plated child king mummy, exhibited in the museum in Fitzgerald's first minutes, starting now. The gold-plated child king mummy, exhibited in the museum in Fitzgerald's first novel, The Golden Child, comes from which ancient African civilisation? The Garamantians. Yes. What is the name of the ship's cat in Offshore, who has over the years become as thickly coated with mud inside as out? Stripey.

Yep. In At Freddy's, what is the nickname of Freddy's assistant, Miss Hilary Bluett? Bluebell. Yes. Who is referred to as the Master when he pays an impromptu visit to Freddie's after he has heard of its owner's financial difficulties? Noel Coward. Yes. In human voices, Jeff Haggard's second wife left him because, as she told her lawyers, she could never make him do what?

Raise his voice. Yes. In innocence, what is the name of Chiara Ridolfi's future husband, whom she meets for the first time during the interval at a concert? Salvatore Rossi. Yes. What gifts from Martha does Father Watson immediately give to the convent as prizes in the Christmas raffle? Their... Bath. You have scored an amazing 15 points.

APPLAUSE Wait, why did you not invite him onto the show? I love him. If he'd said three kittens, he would have got 16. So I just thought that was a sign. That's one of the many signs that made me want to do this particular episode is that the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald, I obviously edited that down so you don't get the full two minutes. But... No, I've completely blanked because that was so good. She loved telling us. And the full two minutes. But...

No, I've completely blanked because that was so good. She loved television. And the show's over. She loved television. She did love television, yes. And appropriately enough, this novel, Human Voices, is set at the BBC during the Second World War, the time of the Phony War and radio broadcasting to the nation.

Lucy, let me ask you first, when or where did you first read Human Voices? Probably about 10 years ago, and it was fairly soon after I'd read my first Plan B Fitzgerald, which was Offshore. I was teaching in the English department at Goldsmiths at the time, and I was convening a course called Literary London. And the friend of mine I was co-convening it with, we were trying to put more women onto the syllabus. We had a lot of men and not many female authors on there. And one of the first people that she recommended was Penelope Fitzgerald, so we had to put offshore on. So I read that very quickly, loved quickly loved it and then realizing that a lot of these the early novels are autobiographical in nature I started reading the others and human voices came quickly after that and uh you and I had a discussion didn't we in the run-up to this about

which novel of Penelope Fitzgerald's we were going to do we did yes Fitzgerald mania at the moment and um why did you choose human voices why did we choose human voices I think it's one of the more accessible ones I think we decided to do an earlier one rather than a later one yeah as an introduction to her work perhaps it looks accessible but I think it's a much more subtle and complicated that's very true I agree with you John I like like all her novels really you know there seems to be we were talking earlier if you read one of these books quickly, as one of the reviews of Human Voices said, which you, of course, could do easily because the style is so seemingly

light and amusing, you will miss all the gaps. And the gaps often in Penelope Fitzgerald, the spaces is where the real events, the action, the spaces is where the real uh events the action the feeling is happening well you think you think you think also particularly with the early novels that you're getting a comedy of manners and you are that's absolutely what you're getting except you're not there's something evanescent and yet not evanescent and transcendent about them even in those early books which are about people failing mostly oh yeah she's brilliant on failure um but there's always something slightly out of reach and slightly hard to find

and george where did you first encounter penelope fitzgerald i first encountered penelope fitzgerald at what she described as a posh crammers in Artillery Row, Victoria, because she was my English teacher. Amazing. Wow. I knew that. I can't tell a lie. It was in the autumn of 1975, and I had been sent to the posh crammer,

not because I'm particularly posh or was in need of cramming, but because my deeply fifth-rate boarding school had gone bankrupt the day before we went back in the opposite. I've got a brilliant thing about her. Penelope Fitzgerald in 1975 might be, you might describe her as a middle-aged teacher recovering from a traumatic period of homelessness and deprivation, living in a dreary council estate in South London

with a disgraced alcoholic husband in a dismal low-paid job, her children coming and going from school and university, her early ambitions to be a writer catastrophically thwarted, her life obscure. So you encountered her. We should say, for anyone who doesn't know, that she does a remarkable thing,

which she doesn't publish her first novel until she is... 60. 60. The second novel that she writes, The Bookshop, is shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And the third novel she writes, Offshore, and these three novels come out in the space of three years, the third novel wins the Booker Prize.

And one of the things I got from reading Hermione Lee's biography is not the sense that she had got lucky, but that she had waited, although she would have preferred not to, she had waited so that when the moment came, she was ready to go, right? And she had the stories and had the way of approaching them. I think that's true. The thing about her, you talk about the telly, and she was, you sat there in lessons with this person who was visibly distray and you

know hair everywhere and mild sort of very mild mannered watery eyes looking like she wasn't really concentrating always with a series of carrier bags in which she carried your essays all her stuff and yet she noticed everything and if you sort of said something moronic about Yates which I did frequently that year she would look at you beadily and you'd say well I think it's and she'd go do you and you'd go okay maybe not um and she made you think and I think that's also what she does in the novels and she she hadn't been able to write the novel she had to keep the whole show on the road. You know, Desmond was a hopeless drunk, unemployable,

and by that year dying, though, we callow children knew nothing of this, and keeping the family going and living in the Grimm Council flat, which is just up the road from where I now live, and before that on the boat. On very little money. On no money. You're homeless for quite a long time.

They were church mice poor. And it was all in her head and it was waiting to come out. You know, this is the woman who got a congratulatory first at Oxford and, you know, had to teach. The blonde bombshell. And also apparently her final papers, her tutor at Oxford, Somerville, was so impressed that he said, may I keep these?

And he had them bound in vellum because they were perceived as being the greatest set of essays that an undergraduate had ever produced. And then she goes into hibernation for 40 years as a writer, as a writer. Although it's interesting, you sort of sense that she was practising all the time. I mean, all those pieces that she was writing for Punch, her father was the editor of Punch. I mean, she did start fairly auspiciously, because she went to Punch and she was doing writing.

It was only after that, it was after the war that things really turned bad for her. I just want to ask George one more thing about, so she was actually, that description John read, she was a teacher for 25 years wasn't she she stayed teaching even after she published half a dozen novels she taught you she taught patrick marber she taught edward st auburn quite a lot of anna winter and winter yeah quite a lot of famous people went through that yeah yeah really there was amazing

people helen bonham carter i think that Bonham Carter, I think. And she also taught Clara Alexander, the agent and former publisher, because when I was an infant at Penguin, we discovered that we'd both been taught by Mrs Fitzgerald and we took her out for lunch. Mrs Fitzgerald? I can't call her that. I'm 60 now and I cannot call her. You can still win the Booker Prize, George.

She's Mrs Fitzgerald. And we took her out for lunch to try to persuade her to come to Penguin because she didn't have an agent, famously. She didn't really see the point because it was sort of better the devil she knew. Hermione Lee biography is, I think, a very, very good literary biography. I really, really enjoyed it. And it's an extraordinary life because she ends up being, not only winning the Booker Prize,

but then going on with her last novel to win the National Book Award and becoming a huge bestseller, The Blue Flower in America. And making money and being feted and sort of dying, I think accepted pretty universally as a great writer.

People who follow me on Twitter or listen to this podcast regularly will know that I, in fact, Lucy was taking the mickey out of me earlier because I read publicly. Anyone who follows me will know will I've been able to chart my falling in love. I was saying I enjoyed watching you. I enjoyed watching you fall in love with her over Twister. Exactly. It was one of the things that amazed me I was saying I enjoyed watching you. I enjoyed watching you fall in love with her over Twister. Falling in love with Mrs Fitzgerald over the course of last year.

It was one of the things that amazed me when we started the podcast that you hadn't read any. I mean, I'd only read, to be honest, at that point, The Blue Flower, which I loved and had always thought I must go back and read. Because I'm sure I remember talking to you about Planet of Fitzgerald a few years back. Anyway, I'd just like to say to listeners that the reading experience of, I did them nearly in the order in which she wrote them, the novels that is, but the experience of reading them in the order in which she wrote them

is one I really strongly recommend to people. If you want to watch how a writer builds every time, which some writers are not able to do, but how a novelist builds every time on what they've done in the previous book. To get from the golden child to the blue flower in eight moves is a fantastically interesting and inspiring thing. And also to do it without a dud amongst them as well, I think.

That's amazing. Because she started when she was 60 and she had spent her adult life teaching great books to recalcitrant children. So also, Lucy, you wrote about her, didn't you? You wrote a really fantastic essay about Anissa Bruckner and Penelope Fitzgerald as women in London. Yes, I did a while ago. Yeah.

And then I wrote another essay about her life as well, about just Penelope Fitzgerald's life at some point. And the interesting thing about that was, so Penelope Fitzgerald is, you know, certainly the earlier novels, which are autobiographical, you can see, you know, the idea of a woman. Of which this is what? Solitary in the london setting but one of the other brilliant things about penelope fitzgerald is she loved not just telly but thompson package package holidays yes yes i wrote about that for grantor and so she was really widely traveled oh she was terribly widely traveled i mean it was partly because desmond her husband worked, worked for Lund Polly for years. And so she got all these cut-rate package tours and she loved travelling.

I mean, it was what she did with her Booker Prize winning. She took a package tour to New York. You know, not a kind of grand holiday, and she writes about package tours in, wait, The Golden Child? Yes. Wait, am I getting that wrong? Yes, in The Golden Child. Yes, because the character goes to Moscow. And also they can take the,

they can smuggle things into the packaged halls because they don't get looked at. But it's also because she was broke. Yes, there's the thing, she had no money, so it was the only way to do it. And she went all over the world. I mean, I couldn't believe reading the book that she'd only made one trip to Russia.

If you've read The Beginning of Spring. Well, that's kind of astonishing because... And the detail, and obviously she's read a lot of Russian writers, and the whole way in which, looking back, having read more now, that you see that she very quietly positions herself as a European writer. But it's the difficulty in the books. It's that surface lightness.

It's that very English comedy of manners in which people visibly fail in a visibly painful but not too unkind a way, which is terribly, terribly English. And yet the sensibility and the astringency and the richness of the inner workings are European. I feel like I'm back in class with mrs fitzgerald i'm just going to read the final paragraph but i know you will want to hear what jeffrey archer thought of the bookshop but before we hear from jeff we're going to i'm just going to read you and i'm giving i'm telling listeners now, I'm about to read the final paragraph of the bookshop.

So you might want to fast forward to Geoffrey Archer, or indeed past Geoffrey Archer. But you say about failure, writing about failure. So this is the final paragraph of her second novel, The Bookshop. In the winter of 1960, therefore, having sent her heavy luggage on ahead, Florence Green took the bus into Flint Market via Saxford Ty and Kingsgrave. Wally carried her suitcases to the bus stop. Once again, the floods were out and the fields stood all the way on both sides of the road under shining water. At Flint Market, she took the 1046 to Liverpool Street. As the train

drew out of the station, she sat with her head bowed in shame because the town in which she had lived for nearly 10 years had not wanted a bookshop. Oh. If that isn't the perfect Fitzgerald combination, it's very specific, there are the times of the trains. It's funny because it's true and it's incredibly bleak. It's not that she failed because the town didn't want the bookshop. That's the detail, the very specific detail.

It's not that she had run the bookshop badly. No, but I think there's a core of self-belief and self-propulsion that is in all her characters. They're never pathetic. They keep going in a sort of Beckettian, you know, keep failing better. And she loved Beckett. You know, when you look at how she writes

and you know that she liked Beckett, suddenly there's a kind of correlation there. Anyway, enough from me. Let's hear what Geoffrey Archer made of the bookshop. This bookshop was never going to succeed. Something was going to go wrong. Whether it was the child coming into work, whether it was her attitude to some of the locals, whether it was the book she was buying, whether she didn't have enough money

to finance it properly, you always knew it was going to end in disaster. Now, I'm not discussing her quality as a writer or her insights. She's clearly class act, full stop. But it didn't appeal to me. Now, far be it from me to suggest that Geoffrey Archer didn't like the bookshop because it failed as a business, because she didn't read the market correctly. Oh, that is so good. But it's like one of the things I read doing my homework,

because I'm still Mrs Fitzgerald's A-level student, I'll stop doing that soon, was a review of the Hermione Lee biography by A.N. Wilson. Yes. And he says, of her nine novels, only three are pure gold, at Freddy's, The Beginning of Spring and The Blue Flower. Human Voices, about the BBC during the war, nearly hits the mark and is always enjoyable to reread.

And then this is the bit that made me want to kill him. The other works of fiction have amateur charm, but they read like novellas written by an old lady for other old ladies. And if they were the only thing she had written, it is unlikely that their author would have become the subject of a substantial biography by the former goldsmith's professor of English literature at Oxford. Do you know what really is the capper on that?

A.N. Wilson was one of the people who spoke at her memorial service. Go figure. What a nice chap. Shall we hear from Mrs Fitzgerald? Penelope Fitzgerald's first book was a biography of Edward Byrne Jones and her second book was a biography of her father and three of her uncles called the Knox Brothers. And here she is discussing,

apparently one of the things about Mrs Fitzgerald, George, is that she would rarely give you a straight answer to a straight question. Never. So here she is. The interviewer has just asked her about the differences between writing biography and fiction. No, I thought fiction would be too difficult.

Biography is easier in a way because you've got all that research to do and while you're doing that you're occupied and feel you're very busy and important. In the end you're left, of course, with piles of notes and then you've got to start actually doing the book. But it is in a way an easier matter, I think, than fiction, where you're on your own. Do you enjoy the research?

Oh, yes, because you're safe there, copying bits out. No, it's when you're left on your own. I mean, William Morris said anybody can compose a novel, you can do it on top of the bus, and there were open-top buses in those days, but he was a great man. I think it's quite a frightening moment when you're left alone to to get started oh that's if did that tell you that yeah that's wonderful I love the fact

that she was such a William Morris fan but you know she was very she's creative she painted and and made things she was very and I you always feel that with with the work that she's one of those writers that it it it's an amazing thing to for the books to be as light and as and as perfect as they are but she cut you you feel that the work that she puts into them she is is i mean i don't know whether she wrote we were talking about drafts earlier whether she drafted and redrafted but you do feel that somebody there's somebody who's been waiting like a banked up kind of a tide to write things and she's collected like a magpie she kept commonplace books even when she was at school that she's had got all this up and then she just finds a way of putting it fitting them all together perfectly

lucy one of the things that was said or is said and was said in reviews repeatedly, almost became a cliche about her, certainly her later novels, how does she do it? How does she manage to condense so much detail in a way that allows, in short books, that allow loads of space for the reader to wander around in and explore the world,

a world about which they didn't know they were going to be fascinated. Right? What are some of the hallmarks of her style? Well, I think a bit like what we've been saying, George is right that she does write sort of comedy of manners, but they're not as simplistic as that I think one of the things that gets me every time I read her and the more I read her that originally when I started reading her I would put her into two categories they're sort of the

autobiographical novels and then the later historical ones but as I read it I realized that actually what she's doing with the autobiographical novels is because they're written a bit after the fact they are period pieces and sort of specific in their own right. They're as much a creation as the late historical novels. And I think that it's the texture. I mean, coming back to human voices again, there is so much beneath the surface, as it were, or between the sentences and these little throwaway lines almost

that she builds up the texture of the environment. And so you can learn a lot about London during the Blitz in that time. I mean, should I read this bit from the beginning of chapter nine? Would that be a good bit? After the first week of September, London became every morning a somewhat stranger place. The early morning sound was always of glass being scraped off the pavement. The brush hissed and scraped, the glass chattered, tinkled and fell. Lions handed out cold baked potatoes through one hole in their windows and took in the money through another.

The buses, diverted into streets for which they were not intended, seemed to take licence of a dream, drawing up on the pavements and nosing against front windows to look in at the startled inhabitants. A number 113 became seriously wedged against DPP's taxi in Riding House Street and volunteers were needed to dislodge it. They returned to Broadcasting House white with dust. The air, in fact, was always full of this fine, whitish dust which was suspended in the air and settled slowly, long after the buildings fell.

More menacing than the nightly danger was the need to find a willing listener for bomb stories the next morning. Little incidents of the raid or of the journey to work were met and counted at the office by other little incidents and fell back rebuffed. But all new societies are quick to establish the means of exchange. After Mrs Staples had described how the contents of her handbag, keys, throat lozenges and all had been sucked rather than blown away from her, and how she'd not been allowed to smoke all evening because of the broken gas mains, Mrs Milne felt entitled to a question of her own, if things were going on like this, and she had several anecdotes in reserve, wouldn't it be wise to send one's nice things away to some safer part

of the country? I'm sure it would, said Mrs Staples, if you can find someone you can trust to look after them. I can't get RPD to consider the question at all, he doesn't seem to even know that he has any nice things or not. I dare say Mrs Brooks took most of them away with her when she left Streatham. I don't think we shall hear very much more from that quarter, she added. Mrs Staples considered. You mean specimen glass and china and that sort of thing? Yes, the irreplaceables, the things you never use. Those are what really matters. I've got a damask tablecloth, you know, and napkins to match

for 24 people. I've heard it said that a woman's possessions are part of herself. If she loses her things, her personality undergoes a change. It's just that one has to be very careful when living alone, said Mrs Staples. When one's children are grown up or in the forces and the flat is empty, I find that one talks to certain pieces of furniture quite often, and to oneself, of course. The thing is not to be too hard on oneself, Mrs Milne replied. It's so good. So the thing about her dialogue... I was only going to read the beginning of that,

but then it sort of goes into the dialogue and it's so brilliant. Her dialogue, she says once, I'm very interested in dialogue because the reader has to learn to listen to the voices and to identify the character without the author's interjection. Also, it covers a lot of space on the page. There are so many ways that this book could be written and she writes it in a way that you're continually,

all the interactions, you're continually trying to work out what's really being said. It's so cleverly done and it's only when you go back and reread it that you actually really find out what's happening. But that's what she does in everything. There are these little bombshell lines. And you think, oh. And then you read the next vignette or the next story or the next bit. And there's all this stuff going on in the gaps, as you said, Andy.

And even at the end, you still don't quite know what's happened or what they are that's why they really do warrant rereading and going back to when she's so specific in detail she there's something that she has a i don't know how to explain it because it's almost like genius she has a way of getting exactly to the point of characters, of events, telling them how they are, often in a way that is cutting, but it's not nasty. She has a Nancy Mitford-like eye for people's foibles, but an un-Nancy Mitford-like generosity of spirit. One of the things I was thinking, re-reading Human Voices,

of spirit. One of the things I was thinking rereading Human Voices was that there is this Mitfordian asperity and wit but it's never nasty. Even when you think it's about to be it's never nasty.

It never goes there. But it is incredibly witty. In a really odd way, reading Human Voices again parts of it reminded me a bit of that tv show w1a set in the bbc there's a comedy bits of it I mean obviously they're completely different things but funny but yes but you know there is something that she sees at this and she sees that throughout doesn't she she sees that institutions and sort of societies sort of slightly closed off they have this potential to be incredibly fascinating if like her you have that eagle eye and you can pick up on those little details well

nikki you've got experience of the bbc yeah and you read this yeah what did it did it ring true to the bbc particularly or there are some things which uh so i recently joined the bbc about a year ago but i've worked sort of around in and around it for maybe 15 years. And the use of acronyms in the book is very prevalent today. So, you know. So we should say those include DPP, Director of Programme Planning, RPD, Recorder, Programme Director and just BH, Broadcasting House. Oh, yeah. We still talk a lot about BH. You know, BH. MBH, OBH, yeah, all still talk a lot about BH. You know, BH.

MBH, OBH, yeah, all of that. So, you know, that was true. And I thought it was wonderful. Actually, the bits that really excited me were very much the BBC at war. You know, I thought that was really interesting and the way the BBC dealt with that and the way it had people sleeping in the BBC at night time

and things like that. It was really interesting. But no, the sort of obsession with truth, the obsession with BBC above all else, that sense of this is the BBC and therefore it will be, everything we do is very important still exists. This line here, which given people have strong feelings about the bbc at the best of times and we're not currently in the best of times i mean this is

written in 1979 and it was written about the bbc in the 1940s but it applies i mean the bbc loyally defended their own as a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force and an amateur theatrical company that wasn't too sure where next week's money was coming from. They had several different kinds of language and could guarantee to come out best from almost any discussion. I love it. I mean, that, Nick, that's the BBC now, isn't it? I love this one. that's the BBC now, isn't it? I love this one.

Everyone who worked there, bitterly complaining about the short-sightedness of their colleagues, the vanity of the newsreaders, the remoteness of the controllers and the restrictive nature of the canteen's one teaspoon, felt a certain pride which they had no way to express either then or since. These days it's the missing fork.

That section that you've just read is the section that. The part of that is pretty mainstream, yeah. And that section that you've just read is the section that contains the title of the book, the paragraph above, isn't it? It does. With exiles crowded awkwardly into the new sections, they were broadcasting in the strictest sense of the word, scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe

in the certainty that more than half must be lost, some for the rook, some for the crow, some for the sake of a few that made their mark. Here is Penelope Fitzgerald talking about Human Voices and the BBC. I thought when I came to write the book, which is, of course, long after the war, that all the people I worked with at the BBC would be dead, but they weren't. They're indestructible and they wrote from really all over the world where they got jobs. So I was quite glad to have written that book because it's almost impossible. Anyway, I did try to give the idea of a world without TV, where in fact your only hope of hearing the news was the BBC nine o'clock. There were no other networks, no TV.

There was a sort of golden light over RPDs, he was called. That meant Rimpelkorded Programmes Director. Don't imagine these titles have survived. And he recruited all these young women. It was a sort of horror, but not quite that. And yes, we did feel it was very exciting. It's extraordinary, isn't it? But we did.

George, you've got a bit to read, right? I do. This is RPD has taken his young staff, most of whom are women, young women, including the young woman, Annie, who has arrived from outside London. And he's taken them to dinner at Prunier's, which is very posh indeed. It was posh then, it would be posh now if it was still going. Maybe

it is still going. And they're all sitting at the table. And he says, Sam Brooks is his name, I should like to give you a present, the best. There's no point at all in a present unless it's the best one can give. I don't know what the best would be, Mr Brooks. She was not worried. It was a game. I shall give you a ring. They had all of them been with him in the studio and knew how dexterous he was, but none of them would have believed that he could take the inch of gold wire still dangling from the champagne bottle, pierce the end through one of the red currents and give it three twists or flicks so that the current was transfixed, a jewel on which the blonde light shone. His broad fingers held the wire as neatly as a pair of pliers. Well, Annie. Annie had been keeping her hands

under the table, but now she spread them out on the stiff-feeling tablecloth. They were pinkish and freckled, but delicate, not piano players' hands, not indeed as practical as one would have expected, thin and tender, and most ingeniously. Sandbrooks, after some hesitation, as though making a difficult selection, picked up the left hand and put the current ring onto the third finger, compressing it to make it fit exactly. The others watched in silence. Annie did not know what to say or do, so she said nothing and left her hand where it was on the table. Something inside her seemed to move and unclose. At that precise moment, while the juniors were eating their dessert at Prunier's, Annie fell in love with RPD absolutely, and hers must have been the last generation to fall in love without hope

in such an unproductive way. After the war, the species no longer found it biologically useful, and indeed it was not useful to Annie. Love without hope grows in its own atmosphere and should encourage the imagination, but Annie's grew narrower. She exerted the utmost of her willpower to this end. She never pictured herself trapped in the main lift with Mr Brooks above the third floor, or of rescuing him from a burning building, or a Nazi parachutist, or even a mad producer armed with a shotgun. He existed, and so did she. And she had perhaps 60 years left to put up with it,

although her father died at 56. She was in love, as she quite saw, with a middle-aged man who said the same thing to all the girls, who had been a prince for an evening which he'd most likely forgotten already, who had given her a ring with a red current in it, and who cared, to the exclusion of all else, for his worth. As a result, it was generally understood, Mrs Brooks had left him, and the thought of his loneliness made her heart contract, as though squeezed by a giant hand. But then you couldn't really pretend that he was lonely.

And so Annie didn't pretend. This, of course, meant that she suffered twice and she failed to reckon the extra cost of honesty. Oh, my God. It's so good. I'm sorry. It's so good. Muriel Spark, Girls of Slender Means. I mean, there's something about Fitzgerald that I think makes her

an even greater writer than Spark. She's kind. And Muriel was a bitch. Well, I don't know. I love Muriel Spark. We can have both. For me, there's a real link here between, I would say, Anita Bruckner, Elizabeth Taylor, Penelope fitzgerald in that

they have a precision and understatement are the things that they they excel at and yet they're very different writers from one another i've got a review here from country life of Human Voices. You've got big guns today, aren't you, Andy? But it's by Marganita Lasky. Ah, OK. A great Marganita Lasky. I apologise. Who had a gig reviewing for Country Life. Who knew, right?

This is how she starts this, and this is a joint review... She's there waiting for all of us, I'm sure. ...of Rites of Passage by William Golding and Human Voices. Of these two well-titled novels, William Golding's Rites of Passage is serio-tragic, and Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices is serio-comic. Golding won this year's Booker Prize, Fitzgerald last year's. Both novels are of rare quality. If pressed to say which is the better, I can only answer that different criteria must apply. If the reader wants a book that makes him think and go

on thinking, then Golding is his man. If he wants a book that makes him think and laugh, Fitzgerald is his woman. The only qualitative comparison I will venture is that Fitzgerald makes us laugh more than Golding makes us think.

Isn't that great? That's quite Fitzgerald-ian. It is, isn't it? It's that nailing. Gerald makes us laugh more than Golding makes us think. Isn't that great? That's quite Fitzgeraldian. It is, isn't it? It's that nailing. There's a lovely thing she said. She wrote an introduction to her father's book of light verse in my own days. He'd been the editor of Punch.

She says, light verse is a product of civilisation, for it is a sign of being civilised to be able to treat serious things gracefully. The concern can be felt, however, beneath the surface. Just as light verse is based on strong-mindedness, so his kindness was based on courage, and what always goes with true courage, reticence. To be thanked was for Ivo, her father, a dreadful experience.

She has the lead character in the in the bookshop muse to herself which she clearly you know also was an opinion she shared with her character which is a bit where she says human beings are divided into the class of either exterminators or exterminatees and i think this book in a sense like all her books she's really interested in power in in how people position themselves in relation to one another not not the exercise of power that's not what I mean, but how in the section in Human Voices, again a recurring theme, the idea of falling in love with someone and being in love with someone, and that's the status quo now. Even if the love is not reciprocated, how then does the person cope with this new reality?

It strikes me that it's not not considering the kind of life that she lived, that makes an awful lot of sense that it would come, that would be how she would write with this very sort of, not just the way you've described it but with this sort of sympathy as well because she was somebody who was sort of buffeted about by life's cruel

twists let's say, I mean obviously she had her time at the end but she went through an awful lot of hardship to get to that. Her mother died when she was young that was kind of yes so she yeah so she lives this kind of sense of i don't know there's something about her being very accepting of um what was the thing that she said about you know she writes novels about people she feels are sadly misunderstood yes you know i think that she, and I think I could imagine that, I have no idea, but I'd imagine she felt sort of misunderstood or trapped at various points.

I don't know. It's so hard. She's quite sadly mistaken. Sadly mistaken. She describes herself as a depressive humorist or just depressed. What's the difference? And then she wrote this brilliant piece called curriculum vitae which was published in 1989 and it refers to what you're talking about lucy she says at the end of

this i have remained true to my deepest convictions in her work she's talking about 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 comedy for otherwise how can we manage to bear it pretty good isn't it that's it though isn't it that's the exact i look at these poor distributions of power whether by design or accident, and I try and elucidate the comedy in them. And she knows what it's like to be on the receiving end of that as well, I think. Maybe that's where some of that kindness comes from,

that there's an empathy there. Maybe it's not even sympathy, is it? It's empathy because she has suffered. And not a shred of self-pity again. Oh, no, no. And never to shine a light back on herself in a weird way even though so many of the earlier works are so autobiographical she wouldn't hate to be described as someone writing auto fiction or something like that today so we use this quote

about muriel spark when we did muriel's memento mori on on batlisted which i lifted off of amazon because i thought it was so brilliant which was somebody said Muriel Spark does not suffer the lazy reader. And I think that's true of Penelope Fitzgerald again but she's kinder to the reader as well. Can we listen to Mrs Fitzgerald's capacity for not quite answering a question and also talking about telly? You can hear both those things happening. The interviewer has just said to her,

well, you like to make your readers pay attention, don't you? This is what she said. I think readers do far more than they're given credit for. Particularly, I don't think they need everything explained to them. Although perhaps television's changing that a bit. Television's altered the endings a good deal because in the average television, well, even if it's a Simpsons or something, you don't get the old definite ending. In fact, just when you're expecting to find out what has happened, the credits roll up, begin to roll up. And you get used to that. And I think novels go the same way. They don't have a definite ending. And I think novels go the same way.

They don't have a definite ending. If, as often happens, a TV is taken from a novel, they will very often remove the definite ending and substitute the credit rolling type, you know, sort of peer through the credit trying to find out if you can find out a bit more, but no, it's over. I just love the idea of Penelope fitzgerald in the 90s she watches the simpsons which i should think she watches because the writing is so good and it's funny but it's also doing other you know clever things and she had grandchildren and she had grandchildren of course very true

have you got a bit i was i mean this is probably related to earlier but i was just thinking to the bit in um the hermione lee biography where she talks early on about fitzgerald writing film reviews when she was a punch and that kind of bit and she says something quite clever about um that apparently review of the pride and prejudice film the one that starred greer garson and lawrence olivier that penelope fitzgerald turned this into an essay on comedy and lee points out that comedy is not as hollywood would have it uproariously good-natured. It is nothing of the sort. It is about social distinctions and restrictions and a film version of Austen,

which, and then this is quoting Fitzgerald, in an unlucky mood of universal benevolence, allows no one to be boring, sarcastic, unpleasant or snobbish, completely misses the point. It's very clear very early on in her life that Fitzgerald understood what made comedy

comedy right and that's what we see in the novels all the time this idea these kind of social restrictions people you know that's what she's that's what she's able to do and skewer so well but not ever in that mean way right the way through to the later novels too because there's that's wonderful bit in Gate of Angels when Daisy is revealed to be not what frank was hoping her to be and you know she is not the sort of girl you marry yes is made very clear and very plain and everyone should read it it's the most wonderful novel but it's all very delicately done. Yeah. I'm just going to read this. We talked about her being funny. You were talking about comedy.

I'm just going to read two paragraphs from the very beginning of Human Voices. At the time of the Munich Agreement, a memo had been sent round calling as a matter of urgency for the recording of our country's heritage. It was headed, lest we forget our Englishry. Sam had disappeared for over two weeks in one of the Woolseys, pretty infirm even at that time, with an engineer and an elderly German refugee, Dr. Vogel.

Dr. Vogel, cruelly bent, deaf in one ear, but known to be the greatest expert in Europe on recorded atmosphere. There was not much hope of common sense prevailing. Dr. Vogel, in spite of his politeness and gentle Gantz-Mannerheits, was an obsessive who had been seen to take the arms of passers-by in his bony grip and beg to record their breathing, for he wished to record England's wheezing before the autumn fogs began. Have the goodness, sir, to cough a little into my apparatus,

Sam thought the idea excellent. I mean, you know, just as a piece of comic. Penelope's actually a Simpsons line. Simpsons line TV, is there anything it can't do? Penelope Fitzgerald, is there anything she can't do? You know, to have so much range when what you specialise in is seeming light comedy. And she never, I love it, another great question,

she was asked whether she thought fiction was a consolation and she said, no, if it means second best, something to keep you quiet, like a consolation prize. But yes, if consolation is to be made welcome in a different world where the laws of time are suspended and yet which is still my own i just think that's such a brilliant so we're going to wrap up in a minute but before we wrap up i'm going to ask each of you a question so we're recommending to listeners that they if they haven't read penelope fitzgerald before they could start with human voices and

they'll get loads out of it i know it's a wonderful book and they'll enjoy it. Which Penelope Fitzgerald novel should they read after they've read Human Voices? John? Ooh, that's a tricky one. I like your idea of trying to be a bit chronological with them. I would read Offshore, I think. So that's the one before? It's the one before.

It's the closest, I think. If you just want to read two Penelope Fitzgeralds and you've already read Human Voices, I would go for Beginning of Spring. Okay. Narrowly over The Blue Flower. George? It's a toss-up, Gate of Angels or Beginning of Spring.

You love Gate of Angels. I love them both. But I've re-read Gate of Angels this week. And how was it? Delightful in every single possible word and way. We should say that Penelope Fitzgerald loved setting her novels at points of change. So Gate of Angels, for instance, is set in... Cambridge.

Cambridge, thank you. Is set in Cambridge in 1913? 12? 12, I think. So, we, the readers, know what is going to happen quite soon. The last four are all broadly historical novels, aren't they? But as Lucy was saying, they all not yeah in a way and lucy and lucy to you you've read human voices which one should you read next oh just to annoy

you offshore that's all right it doesn't annoy me i think i have i mean i to be honest with you i think you could be i would say read any and all of them but offshore has a special place in my heart i think because it was the first one i read She was so badly treated when she won the Booker Prize for that, which is such a shame. Anyone who saw the documentary on BBC4 a few months ago about the history of the Booker Prize will have seen a clip of Penelope Fitzgerald being treated appallingly by, amongst others,

Robert Robinson and Susan Hill and Faye Weldon after she had won the prize. It was on the night she won the prize. It was ritual humiliation. It was appalling. Though, to be fair to Susan Hill, in her review of the Hermione Lee, she made a clear point of saying, to my shame, I behaved very badly. Also, if I just may add my interest in offshore as well,

I think because partly if you think about her life as a whole, Offshore, the years that she draws on to write Offshore are the very worst years of her life. I mean, the absolute down in the depths and the fact that she comes out of that and, you know, however many years later, produces a novel which then wins the Booker Prize, I think is just an astonishing achievement

and is something that should be lauded. I would, for my part part i would like to say at freddy's which is set in an awful children's stage school is my favorite of the early ones and then i would like to reiterate to listeners yet again the beginning of spring is one of the best historical novels or for that matter novels that i have ever read. Which I read this week and just had utter joy. Unfortunately, Nicky is signalling it's time for the pips, Big Ben's sonorous chimes to bring these revels to a close. Full some thanks to George and Lucy, to Nicky, our BBC-infused, omnicompetent producer,

and to Unbound, our ever-generous broadcast partner. You can download all 87 of our shows for free, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website backlisted.fm and you can contact us on Twitter, Facebook and via Boundless. Before you do that, why not leave us

a star-spangled review on iTunes or whichever platform pipes truth and delight into your home. Thank you for listening. We'll be back in a fortnight. Yay! Yay! If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted.

As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.