Backlisted - Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald - rerun

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

In this episode from March 2019, Andy and John are joined by Georgina Morley who was then the Non-Fiction Editorial Director at Picador,  and Lucy Scholes, the Senior Editor at McNally Editions. The book under discussion is Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices, her fourth novel, set in the BBC's Broadcasting House during the Second World War. Before that, John extols the virtues of The Good Immigrant (USA) edited by Nikesh Shukla & Chimene Suleyman and Andy is impressed by Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall.  * 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. *There is a bonus episode on Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prize winning novel Offshore for our Patreon subscribers, along with book chat, no adverts, and extra fortnightly episodes and original writing. ⁠www.patreon.com/backlisted⁠ * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to one of our backlisted reruns. The episode you're about to listen to was recorded seven years ago. And it's on the novel Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald, a writer who has become central to backlisted over the years. The guests are the publisher George Morley, who was taught by Penelope Fitzgerald. Spoiler! Yeah, true, spoiler.

And Lucy Skolls, who is now also a publisher, the most amazing collection of books being brought back into print at McNally editions. One of the things that you'll discover is, to me at least, the most horrific revelation about any author's practice in the whole of the 10 years of backlisted. Listen out for the gasp of everybody in the room. Well, I... Hi, it's Andy. I remember this episode with great fondness for the simple reason that it's about,

Elope Fitzgerald, who I hadn't read before we started work on Backlisted and has become one of my favourite authors, bar none. Absolutely. I've now read everything she wrote pretty much at least a couple of times. And the marvellous biography. And the marvellous biography. Human voices is, I think, it's a funny thing to say, isn't it? It's one of the lighter ones.

And yet at the same time, it isn't very light. but it perhaps lacks the depth of field that she reached by the time she got to her last novel, The Blue Flower. Those last three magnificent historical novels are incredible, aren't they? Nevertheless, Human Voices was a wonderful book when it was published, a wonderful book seven years ago, and I'm certain remains a wonderful book in 2026. Yeah, and if you're a big fan of Penelope Fitzgerald, you can hear a special bonus episode that we recorded this week on another one of her books offshore. In fact, it's the Booker Prize-winning book as part of our special season of Booker Prize-winning shows. Posh Bingo is what we...

We're calling it Posh Bingo where you can... Each month we are reviewing or we're discussing one Booker Prize winning book. And this month it happens to be offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald. So if you want to have a listen to that, go to patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Now. Let's hear some human voices from the past. See me, everyone. Enjoy.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Yeah, so last Saturday at the hot tin in Fablishan, 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. So that's good. That's all I've got. That's all I've got for this

episode. I got nothing. I 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 and she. And she did a, I don't know, maybe 10 minute reading of this torrent of abuse and and anxiety and discontent, which on the page would have been one thing and will be one thing, 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 is interesting. 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 a loud wood, 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, come on. Don't worry. You know, I thought it was great. Rachel was brilliant. It was much better to let somebody who loves it talk about it.

So, well, that's the thing. Including you, George. I saw someone on the tube two days ago, and I nearly pap shot at 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. Oh, you'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. It's prowl 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.

And I'm Andy Miller. Joining us today are George Morley. Hello. Afternoon. Hello, George. George. Hello, John. Non-fiction editorial director at Piccador,

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 Trans World, then joined McMillan as non-fiction editorial director in 1994. So have you done 25 years?

I've done 25 years penal servitude in the cause of publishing, yes. In many different buildings. Yes. Her list focuses on serious non-fiction. 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 nonfiction and memoir. The authors she has worked with include in no particular order. Adam Hochschild. Yeah, King Leopold's Ghost, one of the best books ever written. Michael Burley, Robert Service, David Olisoga, Robert Saviano, John Crackauer, Jane Glover, Judith McRoll, 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. Yes. Amazing. Yes, there was swearing in the office. And also joining us, we're very pleased to welcome back, Lucy Scholes. Hello, so 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 Brookner. And now she's back. She's back to do the treble. 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 grant her, 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. things. So she is core backlisted. Thank you, Lucy. I've been listening since the beginning. Yeah, 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 Immigrant. USA, for all kinds of reasons. There was the launch party of the book last night,

which is one of the jolliest and loveliest evenings I've been to. We obviously published the original Good Immigrant two years ago, nearly three years ago. And it kind of, I think it did genuinely change publishing. And this book, 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 in the world? It was a collection of essays by people who were first to second generation immigrants to the UK, edited by Nick Oshukler. We've now sold over 100,000 copies and it goes on. It's sort of become a backlist staple. I get a particular thrill when I go into the Bambury Waterstones, formerly in Otikas, 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. It's really well published. Yes, that is 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.

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 Tejoucaul. There's Alexander Chi. There's Chi Gotsi Obiyama, who's shortlisted 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 American 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 flavor. Beautiful essay. It's edited, I should say, by Nikesh again, and by Shimon Silliman. 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, a really important book, I think. But I'll give you just a little flavor. This is from the brilliant essay by the filmmaker, Jan 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 that 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? That's really good. It's a nice essay. They're all good. I'm really, I'd have 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 Ghostwall. The difference is that I really love Ghostball.

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, Redshift. Yeah. It's not as fragmented as Redshift by Alan Garner, but it has a similar relationship between echoing the past, things that happened several thousand years ago or a hundred years ago

and things that are 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 episode that you read it. I thought it was staggering.

I really, really, so inventive. That's what I came away thinking, aren't people clever? Particularly fair a lot. 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 Al Service, which is one of our largest 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 bat 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, really, don't you think? Oh, yeah, I think that's one of its great skills as an old. 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 booker 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 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 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? Two interesting things about that. One is Tim O'Grady, wonderful Irish-American writer, once 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 snowed much, much worse. I couldn't, 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 re-type 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 just never do the second one. But I can see the, you know, I can see. It's a good excuse there, 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. You have literally erased it. Yes. But it's quite a bold thing. Exactly.

It's the boldness of it. Is that why her second book is quite small? I don't. We're not. The first one is. The first version of this was 500 pages. This is the shortest of all her books. Such a weird way.

That is, I mean, I'm amazing. I mean, I'm in awe. Charles Carlisle 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. And because I know, as an, 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. Jeffrey Archer. He does, he writes him out in long hand.

Can I tell a story that I'm sure Peter Strauss told me. I may have misremembered over the years. He was editing a bit of Jeffrey Archer, which I can't know. No, he never was. It's already. Go on. 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 Ler's. But I've always thought that would be fun to do to actually leave howling errors into an 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 Code by Dan Brown. 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.

That'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 he get the blood rushing through his head. Disloge those ideas. Yeah. Beagent League tried to prove that he'd in a factory written their holy blood, holy growl. The idea of suing somebody for something that is essentially, to nip something that's essentially a fiction.

The whole thing was demented. The whole of QI can be boiled down to Eddie Isard, 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. So he said, it's a 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. 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 like watching TV.

That's one of the things that comes through loud and clear. 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 in 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. plated child king mummy exhibited in the museum in Fitzgerald's first novel, The Golden Child, comes from which ancient African civilization? 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 Hillary Bluett? Bluebell. Yes. Who is referred to as the master when he pays an impromptu visit to Freddy's after he has heard of its owner's financial difficulties? Noel Coward. Yes, in human voices, This 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 Kiara 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? They're... Bath. You have scored an amazing 15 points. Wait, why did you not invite him onto the show? I love him. 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 I'm completely blank because that was so good. 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, where did you first read human voices? Probably about 10 years ago. And it was fairly soon after I'd read my first Planned to be Fitzgerald, which was offshore. I was teaching in the English department at Goldsmith 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 are on there. And one of the first people that she recommended was Plenope Fitzgerald, which we had to put offshore on. So I read that very quickly, loved it. And then realizing that a lot of these, her early novels are autobiographical in nature,

I started reading the others, and human voices came quickly after that. And you and I had a discussion, didn't we, in the run-up to this about which novel of Penelope Fitzgeralds we were going to do. We did, yes. Fitzgerald mania at the moment. And 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 as an introduction to her work perhaps. I think it looks accessible, but I think it's a much more subtle and complicated bit of work. That's very true. I agree with you, John. I 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 feeling is happening. Well, 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. 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 cramers. in Artillery Row, Victoria, because she was my English teacher. Amazing. Wow. I knew that. I can't tell her right. It was in the autumn of 1975, and I had been sent to the posh grammar,

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 it. Penelope Fitzgerald in 1975, you might describe her as a middle-aged teacher recovering from a traumatic period of homelessness and deprivation, living in a dreary counsellor 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. 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, 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 beedly and you'd say, well, I think Yates, da, da, da, da. And she'd go, do you? And you go, okay, maybe not.

And she made you think. And I think that's also what she does in the novels. And she hadn't been able to write the novels. She'd 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. thing of this and keeping the family going and living in the grim council flat which is just up the road from where I now live and before that on the boat very little money on no money

they'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 a woman who got a congratulatory first at oxford and you know had to teach the blonde bombshell I mean was a kind of famous and also apparently her final papers, her tutor at Oxford was so, Somerville was so impressed that he said, may I keep these? And he had them bound in vellum. Yeah. 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 she, it's interesting, you sort of sense that she was practicing all the time. I mean, write all those pieces that she was writing for punch. Her father was the editor of punch. I mean, she did start fairly auspicious. I mean, because she went to punch and she was doing writing. It was only after that, but 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 Marba, she taught Edward St. Orban, quite a lot of... Anna Winter. Anna Winter, yeah. Quite a lot of famous people went through there. Tilderswinter. Yeah, really. Really, there were amazing people. Helena Bonn and Carter, I think.

That was, because she'd also taught it quick. And she also taught Clara Alexander, the agent and former publisher. Because Claire, when I was an infant at Penguin, we took, 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. You know, I'm 60. I cannot call her.

You can still win the book of prize, George. She's Mrs. Fitzgerald. And we took her out for lunch to try to persuade her to come to Penguin. And she did, 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 a, 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 Booker, becoming a huge bestseller, the Blue Flower in America. and making money and being fated 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 fall in love with her. Fall in love with Mrs. Fitzgerald. It was one of the things that amazed me but 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 plenty 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 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 doubt.

done amongst them as well, I think. That's amazing. But that's because she started when she was 60. Of course. 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 Anita Brunner 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 one.

Solitary woman in the London setting. But one of the other brilliant things about Penelope Fitzgerald is she loved, not just telly, but Thompson package to us. Package holidays, yes, yes. I wrote about that for granted her. And so she was really widely traveled. Oh, she was terribly widely traveled. I mean, it was partly because Desmond, her husband, 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. But she writes about package tours in, wait, the golden chart. Yes. Wait, am I getting out wrong? Yes, because the character goes to Moscow. And also they can take the, they can smuggle things into the package tours 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. She went all over the world. I couldn't believe reading in the book that she'd only made one trip to Russia. If you've read the beginning of spring. That's kind of astonishing because... And the detail, 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 and John to would be. I'm just going to read the final paragraph. I know you will want to hear what Geoffrey 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 telling listeners now, spoilers, I'm about to read the final paragraph of the bookshop. So you might want to fast forward to Jeffrey Archer or indeed past Jeffrey 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 Thai 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 ten 46 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 ten years had not wanted a bookshop. 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 that, yeah, it'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 Bacettian, you know, she's failing better. She loved Beckett, you know, of 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 Jeffrey Archer made of the bookshop. This bookshop was never going to succeed. Something was going to go wrong. Whether it was the child coming in to 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. No, 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 Jeffrey Archer didn't like the bookshop because it failed as a business because she didn't read the market correctly.

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 Hermani 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 cap on that? Ian Wilson was one of the people who spoke at her memorial. Go figure.

What's 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. But 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 they 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 get started. Did that take you back? Yeah, that's wonderful. I love the fact that she was such a William Morris fan.

But, you know, she was very creative. She painted and made things. She was very, and you always feel that with the work. She's one of those writers that it's an amazing thing for the books to be as light and as perfect as they are. But you feel that the work that she puts into them 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 tied to write things. And she's collected like a magpie. She kept commonplace books even when she was at school. But she's got all this 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, the sort of the autobiographical novels and then the later historical ones. But as I read it, I realize 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. There is much a creation as the later 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 9? 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 license of a dream, drawing up on the pavements and nosing against front windows to look in at the startled inhabitants. A number one one or three became seriously wedged against DPP's taxi and ridinghouse 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 countered 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 had been sucked. 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 Stratham. 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 taught.

walks 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 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 and it's so cleverly done it. 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.

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, it's not nasty. She has a Nancy Mitford-like eye for people's foibles, but an un-Nazi, a Nancy-Mittford-like generosity of spirit. Yes, because one of the things I was thinking,

rereading human voices, was that there is this Mithfordian asperity and wit, but it's never nasty. No, no. Even when you think it's about to be, it's never nasty. No, it never, it never goes. there. It never goes there. But it is incredibly witty. I mean, parts of, 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.

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 society is 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? There are some things which, so I recently joined the BBC about a year ago, but I've worked sort of 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, program director and just BH Broadcasting House. Oh, yeah.

We still talk a lot about BH. NBH, 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 sort of, you know, 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. You know, that sense of this is the BBC and therefore 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, isn't it? I mean, Nick, that's, that's the BBC.

now, isn't it? Yeah, 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 forks. And that section that you've just read is the section that contains the title of the book, the bit of 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 9 o'clock. There were no other networks, no TV. There was a sort of golden light over RPDs that was called.

That meant rinkordid programs. Program's director, I don't imagine these titles have survived. And he recruited all these young women. And it was a sort of horrid, 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 Pruniers, which is very posh indeed. Was posh then, 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 the present. 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, pierced 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-player's hands. Not indeed as practical as one would have expected, thin and tender, and most ingeniously, Sam Brooks, 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 pruniers, 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 will power 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.

I can't. I'm sorry. So, it's so good. Mural Spark, girls of slender means. I mean, there's something about Fitzgerald that I think makes an even greater writer than Spark. She's kind. And Muriel was a bitch.

Well, I don't know. I love Muriel. We can have both. For me, there's a real link here between, I would say, Anita Brunner, Elizabeth Taylor, Penelope Fitzgerald. in that they have a precision and understatement are the things that 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. But it's by Marginita Lasky. Oh, okay. I apologize. Who had a gig reviewing for country life. Who knew, right? This is how she starts this. And this is a joint review.

Waiting for All of Assumption. Rights of Passage by William Golding and Human Voices. Of these two well-titled novels, William Golding's Rights of Passage is Serio-Tragic, and Penelope Fitzgerald's human voices is Serio-comic. Golding won this year's Booker Prize, Fitzgerald last years. 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, babe? 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 civilization, for it is a sign of being civilized 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 Evo, her father, a dreadful experience.

She has the lead character in the bookshop, mused 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 how people position themselves in relation to one another 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 even if the love is not reciprocated how then does the person cope with this new reality It strikes me that it's 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 true. Yes. So she lives this kind of sense of. I don't know, there's something about her being very accepting of, what was the thing that she said about, you know,

she writes novels about people she feels are sadly misunderstood. 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.

She described herself as a depressive humorist or just depressed. What's the difference in an interview? And she wrote this brilliant piece called Curriculum V-Tai, 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. 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. 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. We used this quote about Muriel Spark when we did Mumento Mori on that listed, which I lifted off of Amazon because I thought it was so brilliant, which was somebody who said Muriel Spark does not suffer the lazy reader. And I think that's true with Penelope Fitzger. Cheryl, 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 tele? 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 giving credit for. Particularly, I don't think they need everything explained to them, although perhaps television's changing that a bit.

The televisions 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. If, as often happens, a TV's 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 that you can find out a bit more, but no, it's over. I just love the idea of Fernalphine 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 too. Have you got a bit, man? I mean, this is probably related to earlier, but I was just thinking to the bit in the Hermione Lee biography where she talks early on about Fitzgerald writing film reviews when she was at punch and that kind of bit. And she says something quite clever about

that apparently review of the Pride and Prejudice film, the one that starred Greer Garson and Lawrence Olivier, that Penanope Fitzgerald turned this into an essay on comedy. And Lee points out that comedy is not, as Hollywood would have it abhoriously good natured. It is nothing of the sort. It is about social distinctions and restrictions and a film version of Austin 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 able to do and skewer so well, but not ever in that mean way. Right the way through to the later novels, too, because that's wonderful, 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. It's 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 English re.

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. Fogel. Dr. Fogel 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 Gantzmannheitz, was an obsessive, who had been seen to take the arms of passers-by in his bony grip and begged 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 is actually a Simpsonsignite, 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 specialize 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 there's a wonderful book and they'll enjoy it.

Which Penelope Fitzgerald novel should they read after they read human voices? John. Ooh, that's a tricky one. I like your idea of trying to be 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, in, if you just want to read two Penanope 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. I love them. I love them. I love them both.

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 the Gate of Angels, for instance, is set in Cambridge. Cambridge, thank you. It's 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? And as Lucy was saying, they all not, in a way. 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 it's brilliant. I mean, to be honest with you, I think you could read any, I would say read any and all of them. But offshore has a special place on 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 BBC 4 a few months ago about the history of the Book of Prize will have seen a clip of Penelope Fitzgerald being treated appallingly by, amongst others, Robert Robinson and Susan Hill and Fay Weldon after she had won the prize.

It was on the night she won the prize. It was rich for humiliation. It was appalling. Though, to be fair to Susan Hill, in her review of the Hermannia, Lee, she made a clear point of saying, to my shame, I behave very badly. I 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 onto right 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, have 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, I would like to say at Freddy's, which is set in an awful children's stage school, is my favourite of the early ones. And then I would like to reiterate to listeners yet again at the beginning of spring is one of the best historical novels, or for that matter, novels that I had ever read. Which I read this week and just utter joy. Unfortunately, Nicky is signalling. It's time for the Pips, Big Ben's sonorous chimes to bring these revels to a close. for some thanks to George and Lucy to Nikki,

our BBC infused, omnipotent 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. And before you do that, why not leave us a star-spangled review on iTunes

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