The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald

With the death of Penelope Fitzgerald this year, the literary world lost one of its finest, most original, and most beloved authors. Fitzgerald began her writing career at age sixty and wrote eight remarkable novels in rapid succession over the next twenty years. Completed just before her death, THE MEANS OF ESCAPE is Fitzgerald's first new book since the best-selling THE BLUE FLOWER. Never before have her short stories been collected in book form, and none of them has ever appeared in the United States.
THE MEANS OF ESCAPE showcases this incomparable author at her most intelligent, her funniest, her best. Like her novels, these brilliant stories are miniature studies of the endless absurdity of human behavior. Concise, comic, biting, and mischievous, they are vintage Fitzgerald. Roaming the globe and the ages, the stories travel from England to France to New Zealand and from today to the seventeenth century. Uniting them is a universal theme: the shifting balance between those who are in positions of power--by wealth, status, or class--and those who, deceptively, are not. THE MEANS OF ESCAPE memorializes a life and a writer guided by a generous but unwavering moral gaze.

Throughout the last two decades, PENELOPE FITZGERALD has written a number of little books that have received enormous popular and critical praise. Her novels have sold over 300,000 copies, and portraits of her life have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Her work Offshore received the Booker Prize in 1979, and her novel The Blue Flower won the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1998. Despite the fact that Fitzgerald began her writing career in her 60s, her work was recognized as the strongest argument... for a late-career publishing debut (New York Times Book Review).

She told the New York Times Magazine, I might have written books in all that time and I didn't. I believe that you can write at any point in your life. Dinitia Smith quoted Penelope Fitzgerald from 1998 in her New York Times obituary on May 3, 2000, saying, I have remained faithful to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be vanquished, the vulnerabilities of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and squandered opportunities, which I have done my best to present as comedy, because how else can we bear it?