Nothing shabby.

Penelope Fitzgerald The Afterlife: Essays & Criticism. Counterpoint, 320 pages, $26.95

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 tide 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 lifeblood 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 Ollphant, 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 ...