PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. Three of her novels, The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She won the Prize in 1979 for Offshore. Her last novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the 'Book of the Year'. It won America's National Book Critics' Circle Award, and this helped to introduce her to a wider international readership. She died in April 2000, at the age of eighty-three.
The entertaining latest from Fitzgerald (The Beginning of Spring, 1989, etc.) - as much a story of love in Edwardian England as a gentle but witty sendup of the genre and the age. When young Fred Fairly, son of an impecunious clergyman, becomes a junior fellow at St. Angelicus College in Cambridge, he expects to devote his life to science. Founded by a pope in the 15th century, St. Angelicus is the smallest college in Cambridge - so small that fellows can meet only in the dining hall or the courtyard. Unlike other colleges, it has also remained closed to female visitors - no woman can pass through its gates - and insists that its fellows be unmarried. Ambitious and keen on science, Fred should be happy, but he has fallen in love with the mysterious Daisy Saunders, whom he met after they were both thrown off bicycles by a recklessly driven cart and horse. Daisy is a young woman of character and beauty, but not knowing how dangerous generosity is to the giver, she's been unfairly dismissed from her nursing position in London. Now she's come down to Cambridge with a sleazy journalist out to seduce her, but the accident intervenes. Daisy recovers and finds a low-level job; Fred courts her and proposes, but at the trial of the cart-driver the truth about poor Daisy's background is revealed, and their love seems doomed. As the genre demands, fate benevolently intervenes. Daisy, hearing cries of distress, enters St. Angelicus, where she is delayed long enough to be reunited with Fred. All the correct Edwardian nuances, but often turned upside down. A not-too-serious postmodern and feminine riposte to collegiate misogyny and some of E.M. Forster. (Kirkus Reviews)
