English fiction: Penelope Fitzgerald: Blue flower Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. By Hermione Lee. Chatto & Windus; 508 pages; £25. WHEN Hermione Lee's life of Virginia Woolf was published in 1996, one of the reviewers who vouched for it was Penelope Fitzgerald, then aged 80 and one of the finest English novelists of her generation. As a biographer, Ms Lee was "calm, patient, strong, deeply interested and interesting," she wrote. Her book was "not only very good, but very necessary." A few years after Fitzgerald died in 2000, Ms Lee was approached by the novelist's daughter to write her mother's biography. The result, even at 508 pages, is a little more than half the length of the Virginia Woolf book, but is just as adroitly executed and meticulously researched. Ms Lee takes the reader through the then Penelope Knox's early years, from her childhood in a bookish Hampstead household, through the "exile and imprisonment" of school and on to her years as a dazzling student at Oxford University. During the second world war she worked at the Ministry of Food, did a stint at the BBC and met a dashing young Irish army officer, Desmond Fitzgerald. After their marriage came three children, a series of homes (including a barge which sank, a council flat and even a homeless shelter), years of teaching, thwarted ambitions and financial travails. Only later, when Fitzgerald was nearly 60, did her first novel appear. She described her novels as "tragicomedies," her browbeaten characters "exterminatees" like herself. Ms Lee, a notable critic, devotes whole chapters to Fitzgerald's works in which she expertly evaluates each book. The early novels draw on many autobiographical elements: "The Bookshop" (1978) borrows from Fitzgerald's time working in a cash-strapped Southwold shop; her Booker prize-winning "Offshore" (1979) deals with a houseboat community on the River Thames; and "Human Voices" (1980) fictionalises her wartime experiences at the BBC. Ms Lee is just as insightful about Fitzgerald's later historical novels, particularly her 1995 masterpiece, "The Blue Flower." As Fitzgerald came late to writing, Ms Lee's biography charts a different trajectory from that of other writers" lives. This is a book shorn of the usual chapters on struggles to find a publisher, early success and hubris, or peaking too soon and subsequent disillusionment. Fitzgerald did a great deal of living before that first novel, and this offers scope to dwell on her other pursuits. Much is made of her frequent travels and appetite for languages and poetry, how she "relished" bullfights. However, Fitzgerald was as evasive and enigmatic as her books. Information on some parts of her life is scarce, and in crucial places there is a dearth of letters. Certain episodes, Ms Lee writes, were "consigned to silence." She staves off the reader's frustration by filling gaps with educated guesses, mining Fitzgerald's juvenilia, decoding marginalia and, as Fitzgerald's quirks hardened into crabbiness, summarising the caustic notes the grande dame prepared on other writers. Those who did not like Penelope Fitzgerald found her reserved, perverse, stubborn, mischievous, wilful and sharp- tongued. Those who did like her found her kind, wise, stoical, funny, reticent, brilliant and generous. Ms Lee then concludes: "But those two people were one person." Ms Lee's shrewd examination makes this a riveting biography, and gloriously illuminates the separate talents of two distinguished ladies of letters.