SOURCE: “Tradition and Some Individual Talents,” in Hudson Review, Vol. 45, No. 3, Autumn, 1992, pp. 488–89.

In the following excerpt, Pritchard lauds Fitzgerald’s Gate of Angels as a “delightful entertainment.”

For some reason I’ve failed to read Penelope Fitzgerald, thus know her only by the latest The Gate of Angels. It is a delightful entertainment, set in 1912 in a mythical Cambridge college, St. Angelicus, where Fred Fairly is a junior fellow, and in London, where Daisy Saunders is a nurse at Blackfriars Hospital. The novel charts their meeting, separation, and coming together again; but its real interest is the offbeat sensibility of Penelope Fitzgerald who ranks right up there with the eccentric English fictionists of this century. The time period is perfect Ivy Compton-Burnett; the dialogue sometimes sounds straight out of Evelyn Waugh, as when Fred visits his family at the Rectory (by train to Blow Halt with a...