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The Beginning of Spring

"Highly evocative of time and place"

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LoveReading Says

LoveReading Says

April 2010 Guest Editor Katharine McMahon on Penelope Fitzgerald...

Highly evocative of time and place this wonderful novel set in the early 20th century is funny, touching and curious. A real treasure of a novel.

I was introduced to this author just as I began to be published, and I love her wit, and her quirky approach to plot.  The Beginning of Spring is a delicious novel, and it's as if the entire book is pitched towards the very last few lines.  This reads like a small, perfectly formed, Russian novel, but amazingly is written by a very English author.

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Selected by our Spring 2021 Guest Editor, Guy Gavriel Kay...

A.S. Byatt wrote once that she could make a good case for Penelope Fitzgerald as the best 20th century novelist in the English language in the post-war period. I don’t tend to think in such terms but … I get it. Fitzgerald — especially, but not only, her last four books — is an absolute favourite of mine, and through rereads, too. (Rereading can be a joy, and dangerous sometimes, too.) She started very late in life as a novelist, which will be encouraging for some.

Her best book is generally — and rightly, I think — considered to be The Blue Flower, but my favourite, for the humour, tenderness, unexpectedly wry delights it offers, is her novel set 1913 in Russia, The Beginning of Spring. It has, for a protagonist, a beleaguered English printing shop owner in a wonderfully evoked Moscow. His wife has just left him and their three small children, without warning, to return to England. The year is significant: we are on the eve, but not yet the immediate arrival, of the Revolution, and the Great War. There is, among other joys here, a scene in a birch wood at night that is simply unforgettable, because of how mysterious it is. Indeed, the drowsy child allowed to come into the forest is told that ‘she'll understand in time what she's seen.’ She doesn’t, then, nor do we, entirely. It haunts in good part because of that, a small miracle of writing.

LoveReading

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