They co-edited a magazine called World Review, in which J. In the early 1950s the couple lived in Hampstead, London, where she had grown up. He won the Military Cross in the Western Desert Campaign in Libya, but returned to civilian life an alcoholic. Six months later, Desmond's regiment was sent to North Africa. He had been studying for the bar and enlisted as a soldier in the Irish Guards. In 1942 she married Desmond Fitzgerald, whom she had met in 1940 at Oxford. She worked for the BBC in the Second World War. She was educated at Wycombe Abbey, an independent girls' boarding school, and Somerville College, Oxford University, where she graduated in 1938 with a congratulatory First, being named a 'Woman of the Year' in Isis, the student newspaper. I suppose they were unusual, but I still think that they were right, and insofar as the world disagrees with them, I disagree with the world.' Later on, I found that this was a mistake, but I've never quite managed to adapt myself to it. Fitzgerald later wrote: 'When I was young I took my father and my three uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else wasn't like them. She was a niece of the theologian and crime writer Ronald Knox, the cryptographer Dillwyn Knox, the Bible scholar Wilfred Knox, and the novelist and biographer Winifred Peck. Penelope Fitzgerald was born Penelope Mary Knox on 17 December 1916 at the Old Bishop's Palace, Lincoln, the daughter of Edmund Knox, later editor of Punch, and Christina, née Hicks, daughter of Edward Hicks, Bishop of Lincoln, and one of the first women students at Oxford. Byatt called her, 'Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention.' Biography The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among 'the ten best historical novels'. In 2008 The Times listed her among 'the 50 greatest British writers since 1945'.

Penelope Mary Fitzgerald (17 December 1916 – 28 April 2000) was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England.

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald