The tale of Cinderella tugs at us in many directions, so that even after we’ve long outgrown the glass-slipper version of virtue rewarded we might very well respond to it in other guises. Jane Austen’s Cinderella variations still entertain me. But as far as wish-fulfillment goes, I lean toward tales of the Late Bloomer who finally gets to go to the ball and pip the prize. Take, for instance, Penelope Fitzgerald. Her first book, a biography, appeared when she was almost sixty. By the time of her death in 2000 at the age of eighty-three, she had written two more biographies and nine novels: three were shortlisted for the Booker, another won it, and her last novel won the National Book Critic’s Award. Appropriately for someone who also dabbled in ghost stories, even death appears to be unable to stop her momentum. A Selected Prose has already appeared, and volumes of letters and other writings are in the works. Just published is an aptly named collection of her essays and reviews on literary subjects, The Afterlife.

In an essay on C. S. Lewis, Fitzgerald notes that for him “books were not an alternative but an additional life.” The title chosen by the editors—Terence Dooley with Christopher Carduff and Mandy Kirkby—is itself an example of the afterlife of books: they’re quoting Fitzgerald quoting the Everyman motto quoting Milton’s Areopagitica: “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” These funerary offerings are a varied lot: essays on “master-spirits”; standard-length notices of witnesses to some of this last century’s horrors and of novelists such as John McGahern, Roddie Doyle, and Carol Shields; odd paragraphs written to fill some magazine niche; essays on the literary milieux of Hampstead, Bloomsbury, and the Poetry Bookshop; and finally, and most enticingly, pieces about her family and childhood, her writing and method. What kind of afterlife do these tokens point to? What precious life-blood is here embalmed?

At one point, Fitzgerald identifies herself in a throwaway line as a “common reader.” This is a very misleading, perhaps disingenuous, claim. To begin with, she was a scion of the ferociously bookish Knox clan; her step-grandmother’s diary entry for her marriage day read “Finished Antigone; Married Bishop.” Other family members, besides her two Bishop grandfathers, were her uncles Wilfred (a saintly Anglo-Catholic clergyman—he never lied because “he never saw the necessity”), Ronald (Catholic priest and mystery novelist), Dillwyn (classicist and cryptographer), and her father Edmund (parodic versifier and editor of Punch). Miss Knox graduated from Somerville College at Oxford with honors and at various times of her life taught literature as well. There was nothing ordinary about the way she read books. Still, her comment can be read as a declaration of allegiances. She does indeed read to find what’s common to human life and conversation. If in the quest she finds herself in the verges, surely that is only human, all too human. Fitzgerald wears her learning so lightly that it can seem invisible, but there is always about her sentences a penumbra of a curious mind to whom nothing human is foreign, a mind engaged and detached, of the world and outside it.

Fitzgerald’s quality of mind doesn’t much show itself in argument or even in exposition—she dispatches with the biographical facts of the authors she’s considering with almost indecent haste. But we can get a sense of it in other ways. Personally reticent, she often wrote on authors of similar temperament, if not style, to her own: Jane Austen, Margaret Oliphant, E. M. Delafield, Barbara Pym. It is tempting to read her comments on them as providing oblique clues to her own view of the world. What she says of reading Barbara Pym is obviously true of her as well: “We have to keep alert, because she will never say exactly what we expect.” But absurd as it is to have to say it, Fitzgerald’s thoughts about these writers are most valuable for providing insights into them. These writers are much loved by common readers and, with the recent exception of Austen, critically invisible. They don’t provide professional talkers with much to talk about. Fitzgerald, however, is always illuminating on those writers who, like M. R. James, have a “habit not to make too much of things.”

Fitzgerald wrote quite a bit, for instance, on Margaret Oliphant. When Mrs. Oliphant is read now, it’s usually as an Austen or Trollope substitute, but her domestic fiction has its own flavor. Fitzgerald singles out this tangy line: “next to happiness, perhaps enmity is the most healthful stimulus of the human mind.” She is very astute at delineating Mrs. Oliphant’s “moral atmosphere”: “warm, rueful, based on hard experience, tolerant just when we might not expect it.” The facts of Mrs. Oliphant’s life—Fitzgerald calls her the “patron saint of all kitchen-table novelists”—easily lend themselves to both aggrieved and sanctimonious retellings, but Fitzgerald pays her the respect of one unsentimental novelist to another.

One of her greatest gifts as a reader is also a teacher’s gift—holding out the encapsulating quotation that everyone else has somehow read over. There’s the thrill of prestidigitation about it, and the chill of revelation too. What could be more revealing about the laconic Charlotte Mew than to learn her favorite joke—“a hearse-driver runs over a man and kills him, and a passerby shouts: ‘Greedy!’” George Moore’s bravado lies exposed when, in a pet at the publicity around the death of Zola, a chief inspiration for his own naturalistic novels, he pouts, “Anybody can get himself asphyxiated.” Fitzgerald’s gift is more than a party trick, though. The treasures she pulls out of her hat show the way to a real appreciation of each person’s particular genius. Here is what she makes of the ballerina Lydia Lopokova’s letters to her husband, Maynard Keynes:

At the end of the letters there are endearments invented for her Maynarochka: “I have no chemise. I touch your bosom without a shirt,” “Your pale chaffinch,” “If it is cold where you are, as it is here, I warm you with my foxy licks,” “Recurrent dismals of sympathy,” “The jolts from my heart for you.” Lydia’s cunning misuse of the English language enchants Maynard, and sometimes, out of tenderness, he tries to imitate it, but cannot… . [These letters] have the kind of warmth that, in To the Lighthouse, frightens Lily, the detached artist. “They turned on her cheek the heat of love. … It scorched her and she flinched.”

And, from a very different universe, here she is on the dowdier domestic product Barbara Pym, like Lopokova only in her ability to “guard against sentimentality.”

She is the writer who points out “the desire to do good without much personal inconvenience that lurks in most of us,” the regrettable things said between friends and “the satisfaction which is to be got from saying precisely things of that kind,” the irritation we feel “when we have made up our minds to dislike people for no apparent reason and they perform a kind action.” But toward her characters she shows a creator’s charity. She understands them so well that the least she can do is to forgive them.

Surely this is true of Fitzgerald as well. Her clear-sightedness about our lot is not the solely clinical kind, where every motive lies naked and shivering, barely recognizable as human. She is ever alert to the “comic and pathetic tension” behind our attempts at self-knowledge, however ineffectual. In her work as well as her life, she appears to have shared the opinion of a figure she greatly admired, William Morris: “A determination to do nothing shabby … appears to me to be the socialist religion, and if it is not morality I do not know what is.”