Among the many symptoms of the American literary scene’s current infirmity is that stateside publishers have been slow to take on, and readers on these shores slow to discover, the English novelist of manners Penelope Fitzgerald. Though British critics have justly compared her to such writers as Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Barbara Pym, and Anita Brookner—all of whom have long enjoyed sizable readerships here—and though back home she has received one Booker Prize and been nominated for three others, two of her eight novels have yet to appear in U.S. editions and her name is nowhere near as well-known hereabouts as that of Pym or Brookner.¹ Why is this so? The answer is not simply that Fitzgerald, now in her seventy-fifth year, is decidedly English in setting and sensibility (so, after all, are Pym and Brookner); nor is it merely a matter of her novels’ temperate tone and modesty of scale. (To read through the reviews of her books is to find, time and again, such words and phrases as “slight,” “delicate,” “unpretentious,” “economy and understatement,” “an impression of sharpness and shortness,” “in no sense a ‘big’ book”; more than one critic has compared her novels to watercolors.) Nor is it that, like Pym and Brookner, she is a writer of unsensational stories. For Fitzgerald’s novels are not only unsensational: they are elliptical, elusive, episodic, at times exasperating in their deliberate slenderness of plot and lack of resolution; their most essential relationships, pivotal incidents, and intense confrontations tend