SOURCE: “Words Break the Pain Barrier,” in London Observer, September 5, 1993, p. 53.

In the following review of Yesterday Came Suddenly, Fitzgerald summarizes King's autobiography, commenting on its story-like quality and on King's modesty in relation to his achievements.

Francis King, the brilliant and distinguished novelist, poet, critic, travel-writer and biographer, turns out also to have been a successful Brighton landlady (his own definition), short-order cook and agricultural labourer. These experiences have led to ‘an attitude of profound, if resigned, pessimism about the world. I do not expect people to behave consistently well, and my observation is that few of them do.’ But he has to admit—he could hardly help it—to his own tolerance and compassion.

He is at the same time open-hearted and inexplicable, generous and alarmingly precise. His epigraph is from ‘I Look into my Glass', in which Hardy regrets that he ought to have outlived...