Penelope Knox Fitzgerald was born into a literary family on December 17, 1916, in Lincoln, England. Her father was E. V. Knox, editor of
Penelope attended Somerville College and, in 1941, married Desmond Fitzgerald with whom she raised three children. Her work experience was varied and included working in the Ministry of Food, for the BBC, in a haunted bookshop in Southwold, and as an English teacher. Her first professional experience in writing came in the 1950s when she worked as an assistant editor for the literary magazine,
Fitzgerald began writing fiction after her husband was diagnosed with cancer in the 1970s, partly in an effort to entertain him through his illness. Her first published novel was a mystery,
Penelope Fitzgerald died on April 28, 2000. A collection of her short stories,
Research notes, manuscripts, correspondence, printed materials, contracts, and photographs, 1971-1988 (8 document cases), document the literary works of Penelope Fitzgerald. Arranged as received in two series representing her creative works and research notebooks, the papers reflect the research and production phases of her works as well as the responses to them. Nearly half of the materials are research notebooks filled with various notes, writings, and clippings. There are also research materials included in the creative works series under each title. A third series was added comprising personal materials not related to any of Fitzgerald's writings. Oversized materials include one promotional poster for
The creative works series includes varying levels of documentation on all nine of Fitzgerald's major works (
The researcher should be aware that this is a very consciously created collection in that Fitzgerald selected the materials that would be included and made notations on many of them as to their significance or their relationship to her work. Some of her commentaries are quite blunt. None of Fitzgerald's life prior to her writing career is reflected in the papers.
Purchase, 1989
Open for research
Andra Whitworth, Vonda Totten, 1990
This series consists of Fitzgerald's papers relating to her various creative works. Arranged as received, the papers are organized into subseries by the particular works they concerned. Some works are more completely represented than others. For example,
Of particular note the page proofs of Evelyn Waugh's
This series consists of 57 notebooks used by Fitzgerald in her research and in drafting her stories. The notebooks contain handwritten notes and parts of manuscripts as well as various loose sheets (many torn from other notebooks), correspondence, and clippings that have been left in their original positions between the pages. In some instances it was possible to determine a title for the notebooks, although there is no assurance that all the material in that notebook pertains to a specific novel or short story. Where no single title could be determined, a parenthetical note has been placed on the folder list to give the researcher some indication of the contents of the notebook. In many cases, the notes written on the covers of the notebooks were simply too extensive or too illegible to transcribe. None of the notebooks are dated, but they are a potential goldmine for researchers interested in Fitzgerald's research and writing processes.
This series focuses on Fitzgerald's personal materials that do not relate to any of her creative works. The folder contains two blank postcards, a memorial card on Joshua Haycraft's death, and a poem written (by Colin Haycraft?) to celebrate the 1978 election of a new Professor of Poetry at Oxford.