In writing the life of Penelope Fitzgerald, Hermione Lee has had to face a number of considerable hurdles. Fitzgerald only began publishing when she was sixty; she left an exiguous body of letters behind; and in The Knox Brothers (1977), her joint biography of her father and uncles, she wrote an account of the men who had the greatest influence on her that no biographer can hope to rival. Still, Lee’s subject also offered blessings. Fitzgerald was a supremely autobiographical writer, all of whose books, even her historical novels, draw heavily from her life. She was not only an author but also a teacher and mother, and these other roles greatly enriched her literary art. And since she has still not received the critical attention she deserves, she is an ideal subject for a full-dress, critical biography.

Lee turns most of these blessings to account by presenting her biography as a family history, with Fitzgerald as the indomitable heroine whose misfortunes only prove her mettle. She also plots the biography as a kind of odyssey: a homecoming through very rough seas. Apropos this, there is a funny bit in Fitzgerald’s book on the Knox brothers where she recalls how all four brothers were invited to speak at the Oxford Union in response to the proposition that “There’s No Place Like Home,” and yet none of the brothers showed because they were detained in London by an impenetrable fog. In this quintessentially Knoxian anecdote, both droll and poignant,