Читать онлайн «The Knox Brothers»

PENELOPE FITZGERALD’S MARRIED NAME, the name under which she became loved and celebrated as a novelist, subtly disguised her true inheritance. For Fitzgerald was really a Knox, and this marked her invisibly – or perhaps, indelibly – all her long life, and especially in her later and astonishingly creative years.

As a Knox, she was descended from one of the great intellectual, Anglo-Catholic clans of late Victorian England. She was born Penelope Mary Knox in December 1916. Her great-grandfather had been the missionary Bishop of Lahore; her grandfather was Bishop of Manchester; one uncle was the writer and translator of the Bible Monsignor Ronald Knox (like Newman, a Roman Catholic convert); and her father was for sixteen years the much-admired editor of Punch, at a perilous time (1932–1948) when the magazine was still a great institution of national identity, like The Times or Speaker’s Corner or Harrods (and shared some of the attributes of each).

The Knox Brothers is her remarkable tribute to this family inheritance. It is a strikingly original group biography, and a highly engaging piece of family history, written with extraordinary wit and shrewdness: a funny, tender, clever book. But it is very much more than that.

Its place in Penelope Fitzgerald’s work is intriguing. The biography first appeared in 1977, when she was sixty. But because of her unusual, late-flowering literary career, it was in fact one of her earliest books, and seems intimately connected with her self-discovery as a writer. In taking the measure of her formidable family background (and this is hardly a work of pious memorial), Penelope Fitzgerald found a narrative style, a fascination with human character, and a series of moral preoccupations which seemed to release the whole flow of her fiction.