Penelope Fitzgerald's novels are described by Frank Kermode in the London Review of Books as "the kind of fiction in which perfection is almost to be hoped for." Louis B. Jones, in The New York Times Book Review (1 March 1992), places Fitzgerald firmly in the tradition of Jane Austen, whose sentence structure is "built on the ruins of Latin rhetoric," while A. N. Wilson, in the Evening Standard, writes: "Fitzgerald possesses what one can only call the purest imagination." Better known in England, where one of her novels received the prestigious Booker Prize and three others were short-listed for the Booker, Fitzgerald also enjoys considerable devotion from American readers, whose numbers have been limited only by the difficulty in obtaining several of her titles in the United States.

Penelope Mary Knox was born on 17 December 1916 in Lincoln. Her father, Edmund George Valpy (E.V. or "Evoe") Knox, edited Punch...