Penelope Fitzgerald, a sublimely gifted and versatile writer, died in London on April 28, at the age of eighty-three. Her book reviews and essays are a model of amateur criticism. Her concise, discreet, intuitive lives remind us that biography belongs to literature, and that the ideal biographer is not an academic specialist, not a forensics expert, but an informed heart in service to the truth about a fellow human being. She was English to the bone and so naturally loved puzzles and games and intellectual entertainments; she wrote ghost stories in the tradition of M. R. James and a humorous locked-room murder mystery complete with codes and ciphers. But it is for her novels—her eight brief, witty, and wholly original novels—that she will be remembered. Here, in the words of Frank Kermode, is "fiction in which perfection is almost to be hoped for, as unostentatious as true virtuosity can make it, its texture a pure pleasure."

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