House Of Air

Product Description
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEE
The previously uncollected occasional prose of a great English writer – full of wit, feeling and illumination.
Penelope Fitzgerald was a prolific letter writer. She avoided the phone if she could, never even contemplated the possibility of going online. Her warmth, humour and supreme storytelling abilities found their best forum here. Surprising, wonderfully funny, definitive, this is a major collection of Penelope Fitzgerald’s reviews, essays and autobiographical writings.
This collection includes pieces on contemporary novelists Giles Foden, Anne Enright, Carol Shields, Rose Tremain, Roddy Doyle; on classic writers Muriel Spark, A.E. Housman, Rose Macaulay, M.R. James, Stevie Smith, Dorothy L. Sayers; on remembering her grandfather E.H. Shepard; on her love of Devon and Spain and William Morris: on writers in their old age; and witty and poignant recollections of her schooldays, her life on a Thames barge, her childhood in Hampstead and the ghost who lived next door but one.
This is a fantastically funny book – as much of an entertainment as the Kingsley Amis letters.
Review
‘Of all the novelists in English of the last quarter-century, Penelope Fitzgerald has the most unarguable claim on greatness.’ Philip Hensher
‘This generous selection of essays, reviews, introductions and other occasional writings proves yet again that stylistically, intellectually and morally Fitzgerald couldn’t put a foot wrong if she’d tried. Hers is an impeccable and unique voice not just from another century but another world.’ Michael Dibdin, Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph
‘Remarkable. It is the range of her scholarship that impresses.’ Doris Lessing, Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph
‘An intelligent writer, superbly and unfailingly so. Wise and funny, with a dry wit allied to a great emotional sympathy.’ Sunday Times
About the Author
Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most distinctive voices in British literature. The prize-winning author of nine novels, three biographies and one collection of short stories, she died in 2000.

Professor Dame Hermione Lee is President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and was lately Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the author of books about Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald, as well as numerous other works.