SOURCE: “Two Bicycles, One Spirit,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 12, 1992, p. 3.

In the following review, Eder praises Fitzgerald’s deft use of details to evoke a sense of possibilities in her Gate of Angels.

High wind and drenching rain lash the flat fenlands [in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels]. Branches blow down; leaves tangle in the horns of grazing cows; partly blinded, they stumble. “Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching.”

Along the road, a covey of Cambridge University dons on heavy iron bicycles—it is 1912—struggles against the wind, black gowns flapping. Nature may be in an uproar, but each academic teeters forward in his own abstraction and at his own rate of speed. When one pedals ahead or drops behind, it is not...