Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (eds): The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (London: Batsford, 1990), pp. 377–378.

Hartley, Cathy (2003). A Historical Dictionary of British Women. Psychology Press. p.349. ISBN 9780203403907. I was totally drawn into the atmosphere of the book, and the characters will stay with me for a long time. Overall, Offshore is a book I'd unreservedly recommend, but not if you go for fast, complex plot. My thanks to Cecily for recommending this wonderful book to me! The Beginning of Spring (1988) takes place in Moscow in 1913. It examines the world just before the Russian Revolution through the family and work troubles of a British businessman born and raised in Russia. The Gate of Angels (1990), about a young Cambridge physicist who falls in love with a nursing trainee after a bicycle accident, is set in 1912, when physics was about to enter its own revolutionary period. Since Fitzgerald lived there the boats are no longer restricted to flushing their toilets on a falling tide, and residents and visitors no longer need to clamber from one boat to another. But the boat owners are in protracted disputes with the owners of the moorings who are apparently seeking more expensive boats paying higher fees, and the owners of older and smaller boats fear being pushed off. A House of Air: Selected Writings (U.S. title The Afterlife) edited by Terence Dooley with Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff, with an introduction by Hermione Lee (2003)

Frank, inveterately English, is stoic in his distress. The printing business must carry on; his young children must be cared for; he must await Nellie’s return – and the end of winter. Fitzgerald is an instinctively humorous writer whose intuition of life’s tragedies never oppresses her delight in the human comedy. When Lisa Ivanovna, with her “pale, broad, patient, dreaming Russian face”, joins the Reid household to help out, Frank falls hopelessly in love. But then, a Russian enigma who is not what she seems, Lisa mysteriously disappears. With all of Frank’s future suddenly up in the air again, spring has come. “A horse-and-cab pulled up outside,” Fitzgerald concludes, with one final, tantalising revelation still up her sleeve. I had the further thought that this book is a little like Goodreads. It's in the way we float in and out of each other's spaces, wafting airs of unknowable lives and unimaginable baggage, and leaving us with momentarily vivid yet inevitably vague images of the other. Some of us turn up in each other's feed only briefly, others hang out for longer, maybe chat over coffee or a drink. But then the tide turns, and some float away on it while others remain behind. After that, she felt that she "had finished writing about the things in my own life, which I wanted to write about: then you must look and find other experiences, you must launch out." In Innocence (1986), she launched out to 16th and 20th-century Italy, then to Moscow in 1913, in The Beginnings Of Spring (1988), to Cambridge in 1912, in The Gate Of Angels (1990), and to late 18th-century Germany in her story of the romantic poet and philosopher Novalis, in The Blue Flower (1995). This was probably her masterpiece; it won the American National Book Critics fiction prize in 1998, and helped introduce her to a wider American readership. Once, I embarked on a project to read all the Man Booker Prize winners, and didn't get very far. I started at the beginning and started making assumptions, like all Booker Prize winners are about the empire. It is books like this (winner, 1979) and Hotel du Lac (winner, 1984) that prove me wrong. And since I've read them closely together I can see some similarities - a cast of characters in a specific place that dictates (or allows for) some of the behavior. It even has the occasional inadvertantly amusing double-entendre that adds entertainment value to many vintage books.

The idea, she later said, “first came to me from a friend of mine who was Swiss but had been brought up in Russia… they had a greenhouse and stayed in Moscow all through the first world war, the Bolshevik revolution, arrival of Lenin… and all this time [were] allowed fuel (coal, wood, birch bark, newspaper) because Russian officials have [a] passion for flowers”. What appealed to Fitzgerald was “a sort of noble absurdity in carrying on in unlikely circumstances”. Towards the end of 1952, Penelope, pregnant with Maria, left the infant Tina behind and sailed with Valpy to New York on the Queen Mary. From the US they travelled by Greyhound bus to Mexico, to visit – as she wrote in the first of her many pieces for this paper ( 21 February 1980) – two old ladies of Irish extraction, because ‘it was hoped that … they might take kindly to my son and leave him all their money.’ But the plan failed, and mother and son ‘left on the long-distance bus without a legacy, but knowing what it was to be hated’. Fitzgerald’s hopes that she might be able to salvage a plotline from the escapade failed also: ‘I could never make it respectable (by which I mean probable) enough to be believed as a novel … I am sorry to let it go.’ The novel was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, [3] The Independent [4] and The Guardian. [5] Hilary Spurling (3 August 2008). "Modesty was her metier". The Guardian . Retrieved 2 September 2017.In a rather curious coda, Edward arrives, drunk, to give Nenna her purse and a present. He gets as far as Maurice, where he and Maurice drink whisky together. Maurice breaks free of her mooring in the storm: ‘It was in this way that Maurice, with the two of them clinging on for dear life, put out on the tide’.