Sex, jealousy, friendships and music, and about the boats sometimes, the right way to prime the pump, and things like that.' When she had finished, Fitzgerald toyed with calling the novel “Nellie and Lisa”, but was dissuaded by her editor Stuart Proffitt at Harper Collins in London, who offered “The Coming of Spring”, a phrase that his author swiftly improved upon. All these old boats leak like sieves. Just as all these period houses are as rotten as old cheese. Everyone knows that. But age has its value.’"

It's a pretty damning indictment of judgment by committee. Because there was no agreement – and because everyone was annoyed – two modern classics were overlooked for … well … a book that WL Webb (then-literary editor of the Guardian) accurately damned with this faint praise: "Offshore is indeed an elegant short novel with the kind of sensibility that tends to do well in literary London." Fitzgerald said after At Freddie's that she "had finished writing about the things in my own life, which I wanted to write about." [12] Instead she wrote a biography of the poet Charlotte Mew and began a series of novels with a variety of historical settings. The first was Innocence (1986), a romance between the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat and a doctor from a southern Communist family set in 1950s Florence, Italy. The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci appears as a minor character. The main characters are Nenna (only 32, but with daughters Martha, 12, and Tilda, 6); Maurice, a young gay man making ends meet as a prostitute; Willis, an old marine painter, whose boat is in need of sprucing up; boat-proud Woodrow (Woodie); and Richard, a natural leader, ex-navy, now working in insurance, with the biggest, smartest boat. Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (eds): The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (London: Batsford, 1990), pp. 377–378. to claim her just as she has decided to return to Canada. And all end up literally suspended, between dry land and the drink. No one is settled in the end, including the reader, who hangs on perilously to a slender spar of the storytelling

Fitzgerald has been compared in her qualities of social comedy and irony to Jane Austen. The comparison is just in many ways, but ultimately unsatisfactory, for she had a metaphysical quality which is less apparent in Jane Austen - and Jane Austen was not the only novelist of that period by whom she was influenced. She spoke with enthusiasm of the way in which Sir Walter Scott mixed up fictional and real characters, and this is reflected in the appearance of the dying Gramsci, in Innocence, and of Fichte, Goethe and Schlegel in The Blue Flower.

She learned how to wait: success as a late distillation of talent. The private story is much stranger and sadder and more haphazard, as Hermione Lee’s remarkable biography “Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life” (Knopf) reveals. The story that Lee’s book tells (or tries to tell, because much evidence has been obscured or lost) is not about patience on a monument but about talent buried under a heavy plinth, and discovered only just in time—the late achievement less a measured distillation than a lifesaving decoction. for happiness.'' Nenna, desperately explaining herself to her husband, says, ''I want you, Eddie, that's the one and only thing I came about. I want you every moment of the day and night and every time I try The riverside industry on both sides has gone, but mostly wasn’t mentioned in the novel anyway. Lots Road Power Station was decommissioned in 2002 and is now the centrepiece of a ‘buzzing new urban lifestyle destination’. The logical implication being that this would have been quite normal (if Danish) behaviour had her brother indeed been such a billetee. There is, at times, something more than a little Pooterish about the life she describes. Thus: "I have been mending my sandals with plastic wood (unfortunately Woolie's only had 'antique walnut') and rather good new plastic soles, also from Woolie's." Or this:Penelope Fitzgerald drew on her own experience living on an old Thames barge that sank right out from under herself - twice. She had a lot of wild experiences to draw on; she was one of those late starters, producing most of her cultish novels as an aging widow. Her late husband, like Nenna's, was not a success. a b Hollinghurst, Alan (2013). Offshore. London: Fourth Estate. Introduction viii - ix. ISBN 978-0-00-732096-7. Offshore is a 1979 novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. Her third novel, it won the Booker Prize in the same year. The book explores the emotional restlessness of houseboat dwellers who live neither fully on the water nor fully on the land. It was inspired by the most difficult years of Fitzgerald's own life, years during which she lived on an old Thames sailing barge moored at Battersea Reach.