I’ve just read another novel about a stage school that specialises in teaching Shakespeare. (The previous one was If We Were Villains.)
This one is set in Covent Garden in 1962 at the Temple Stage School; proprietress, the eponymous Freddie. It was published in 1982 when its author had already won the Booker prize (in 1979) for Offshore. Although Penelope Fitzgerald wrote nine novels, three biographies and a collection of short stories, At Freddie’s is the first I have read. She writes beautifully and if you enjoy Muriel Spark you will warm to Penelope. Three more of her novels were short-listed for the Booker, she was a favourite with critics and today Simon Callow and Alan Hollinghurst try to keep her literary flame alight, yet she has become a forgotten author.
Four of her novels draw on her own life. In the war she worked for the BBC and this provides the basis for Human Voices. In the 1960s she taught at the Italia Conti Academy, a stage school still going strong in London today. A spell working at a bookshop in Southwold led to The Bookshop. For a time she lived on a houseboat in Battersea that eventually sank but provided the background for Offshore.
Her life was not an easy one, although it started rather well. Her father was editor of Punch, her mother one of the first women to go to Oxford and her maternal grandfather was a bishop. Penelope went to Wycombe Abbey and Somerville, Oxford, where she was awarded a congratulatory First. Alan Hollinghurst, in The New York Review of Books, wrote:
She’d come to Oxford expecting poets and orgies, and had seen few of the one and none of the other. She said she’d taken part in “the first Spelling Bee against America,” in which Oxford had lost by four points to a team from Radcliffe and Harvard, and that she had spoken in the Union “with the result that there were only two votes for my side of the motion.”
This was the wry self-effacement of a star student. Isis readers knew that Penelope herself had shone in the bee, and that her spelling of “daguerreotype” had been “loudly applauded by both teams”; but she wasn’t going to boast about that. She finished her remarks: “I have been reading steadily for seventeen years; when I go down I want to start writing.”
Instead she got married to a man she met at Oxford. Desmond Fitzgerald gave up studying for the Bar to serve in the Irish Guards in North Africa where he was awarded an MC. However, his life unravelled in peace time. He drank too much, an occupational hazard in that regiment, and was disbarred after forging cheques in his local. Thereafter they lived a precarious existence relying on her meagre earnings as a teacher and assistant in a bookshop. Her first book was published when she was fifty-eight; it’s a biography of Edward Burne-Jones. I’m glad that I have at last discovered her.