To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > People May 2, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/people/obit/2000/05/02/fitzgerald Penelope Fitzgerald dies at 83 The award-winning author of "The Blue Flower" published her first book in 1975. - - - - - - - - - - - - Prize-winning author Penelope Fitzgerald, who wrote a series of understated novels after embarking on a literary career late in life, has died at age 83. Fitzgerald, whose first book was published when she was almost 60, died Friday in London two days after suffering a small stroke, said her cousin, Oliver Knox. Among Fitzgerald's most heralded works was her latest, "The Blue Flower," a novel set in 18th-century Germany that tells the story of a young artist, later to become the poet-writer-philosopher Novalis, and his romance with a 12-year-old girl. In 1998, it was the surprise winner of the U.S. National Book Critics Circle prize, defeating works by such heavily favored writers as Don DeLillo and Philip Roth. Fitzgerald won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize in 1979 for "Offshore," a quasi-autobiographical novel about life on an old wooden barge moored on London's River Thames. "We lived there because it was cheap, but not because it was safe," she once said. She was born Dec. 17, 1916, to a literary and academic family. In 1953, she was married to Desmond Fitzgerald, and she waited to begin writing until after their son and two daughters were grown. Her novels incorporated elements of her unconventional life. Her first published work, a 1975 biography of Victorian painter and designer Edward Burne-Jones, was inspired by a childhood memory of his windows at Birmingham Cathedral, where her grandfather was bishop -- a memory she called "my first idea of something beautiful." Increasingly, she turned to the past for her settings. "I go back to times when prohibitions and social pressures were stronger so as to concentrate on difficulties which I profoundly believe have not gone away," she wrote in an autobiographical sketch for the U.S.-based H.W. Wilson Co. In 1998, The Guardian praised Fitzgerald's skill at characterization and the subtle, precise effect of her prose. "Her style of writing is deceptively calm: the tone is quiet, resigned to the foolishness of people, amused but not censorious," the newspaper said. "You recognize immediately someone with a delicious sense of words and natural ease in handling them." Despite her late start in her literary career, she published three biographies and nine novels. I've heard my novels described as 'light,' but I mean them very seriously," she wrote in the sketch. "If ever I see somebody reading one of my paperbacks on a bus or in the Underground I have to restrain myself from sitting down next to them and asking them whether they see the world as I do." Fitzgerald's husband died in 1976. She is survived by their three children. salon.com | May 2, 2000 © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. - - - - - - - - - - - -