Vecchio cinema italiano.

A cura di Roberto Cuppone. Pesaro, Metauro Edizioni 2003, cm.12x19,5, pp.237, brossura Allo stato di nuovo. Collana Non solo Pirandello,3.

London, Chatto & Windus 2013, cm.16x24, pp.528, legatura editoriale cartonata, sopraccoperta figurata a colori. Edizione con firma autografa dell'autrice. Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. The first group of these drew on her own experiences -- a boat on the Thames in the 1960s; the BBC in war time; a failing bookshop in a Suffolk; an eccentric stage-school. The later ones opened out to encompass historical worlds which, magically, she seemed to possess entirely: Russia before the Revolution; post-war Italy; Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis. Fitzgerald's life is as various, as cryptic and as intriguing as her fiction. It spans most of the twentieth century, and moves from a Bishop's Palace to a sinking barge, from a demanding intellectual family to hardship and poverty, from a life of teaching and obscurity to a blaze of renown. She started publishing at sixty and became famous at eighty. This is a story of lateness, patience and persistence: a private form of heroism.