Penelope Fitzgerald Began Her Esteemed Writing Career at Sixty

Penelope Fitzgerald grew up in a provincial English childhood in the village of Hampstead, was known as a "blond bombshell" at Oxford, and struggled for years raising children in an impoverished household. Her writing career did not begin until she was nearly 60, yet she went on to win some of the most coveted awards in literature—the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hermione Lee traces Fitzegerald's complicated story in her new book Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life.