Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life – working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school – or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity – she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.
After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have done introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.
Hermione Lee
2013
If you stand in front of a large Burne-Jones painting, such as King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid in Tate Britain, or any other of his major works in oil, stained glass or tapestry, the modern world immediately recedes. The spell cast is hard to resist. No other English artist in the late nineteenth century so completely transports us into another realm where literary or mythological allusions meld with gently refulgent colour, in compositions that have been cunningly designed and elaborately finessed. The subtle strength of Burne-Jones’s imagery owes much to his study of the Italian Renaissance, and in his work we find the last great flowering of the Renaissance tradition before modernism ran like a virus through all the arts, here and there turning its back on the past while determinedly heralding the importance of modernity. Burne-Jones, whose preference in art was for stillness, remained a stalwart opponent: having been brought up in Birmingham, in close proximity to some of the most damaging aspects of the Industrial Revolution, he famously announced that ‘the more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint’.
Burne-Jones’s response to the age in which he lived resonates with present-day anxieties about the social, cultural, financial and political implications of globalisation. Yet there are many reasons why he is so deeply sympathetic. The high-minded and deeply earnest John Ruskin cannot have been easy to tease, but when pseudo-Gothic and medieval public houses began to appear on street corners, Burne-Jones gently provoked him with the remark, ‘Your doing, my dear.’ Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography gives us Burne-Jones’s humour as well as his idealism, the man and his art, while tracing the trajectory of a career that transformed Ned Jones into Sir Edward Burne-Jones, the internationally renowned artist who was socially much in demand. Penelope Fitzgerald’s narrative teems with famous figures from the Victorian era, and inevitably it is bound up with the history of Pre-Raphaelitism, for although Burne-Jones and his friend William Morris were not part of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they were drawn in during the late 1850s by D. G. Rossetti. Burne-Jones’s early, painstakingly detailed pen-and-ink drawings on Arthurian subjects equal in intensity the finest productions in this vein. He went on to make more robust the Pre-Raphaelite achievement, while Morris busily created outlets for its decorative style, through his determination to revive craft and to reform domestic design.
Penelope Fitzgerald seems at home amid this crowded setting. Admittedly, the six years she spent researching and writing this book gave her an impressive intimacy with her subject. But also relevant here is the fact that she herself was descended from a formidable tribe. There were three bishops in her family background, and immediately after she completed this biography, she wrote The Knox Brothers about her father (the writer and editor who brought Punch into the twentieth century) and her uncles, among whom was the Anglo-Catholic priest Ronald Knox who, after agonies of indecision, ‘poped’, then wrote about his spiritual journey and became a famous apologist for Roman Catholicism. From The Knox Brothers alone, quite apart from her later novels and her biography of the poet Charlotte Mew, it is evident that Fitzgerald understood the complex tensions harboured by individuals and within families. She was well prepared for the entangled loyalties within the Pre-Raphaelite circle, its creative brilliance as well as its dysfunctional ingredients. As a biographer, her observations are wry and sane.
Burne-Jones’s mother died six days after his birth. He claimed that it left him with persistent guilt and made him ever after kind to women. The lack of a mother very probably triggered his desperate need for female affection. When he first met Georgiana Macdonald, who was to become his wife, she was only ten years old. They became engaged when Georgie was fifteen. Over the years, this small woman had to put up with a great deal, not least the emotional crisis caused by Burne-Jones’s great passion for the Greek beauty Maria Zambaco and which was made worse by her public suicide attempt when he tried to extract himself from their relationship. Fitzgerald admires Georgie’s firmness, her dignity and steadfastness. Others have remarked that she gazed at the world through pale grey eyes: Fitzgerald adds that these eyes ‘did not so much seem to reprove small mindedness as refuse to admit its existence at all’.
The Birmingham of Burne-Jones’s childhood had showed him that advancing industrialisation brought in its wake moral squalor. In response to this he looked back to medieval times, to what he felt to be a more pristine world, and fed his mind on chivalric ideals. Fitzgerald understands this well: ‘What he knew from his own experience was that beauty was an essential element without which human nature is diminished. If art gives us beauty it will make us more like human beings.’ Amid the casual flow of imagery that surrounds us today, this argument may seem bluntly utilitarian and overly simplistic. But there is no doubt that Fitzgerald here identifies one of Burne-Jones’s core beliefs. In old age his need for beauty sharpened his obsession with young women. He became completely besotted with one after another, including May Gaskell, to whom he wrote often five or six times a day, Fitzgerald reminding us that in this period there were in all seven posts in the course of a single day. It did not seem to matter to him that she was married. ‘Mrs Gaskell, if not firm, must have been a tactful woman,’ Fitzgerald remarks. ‘She managed a difficult situation extremely well.’
This dry authorial voice is one of the pleasures of this book. Another is the use of idiosyncratic detail. Whistler, who favoured full-length portraits, is glimpsed weeping over his inability to capture on canvas the tightly trousered legs of his patron Frederick Leyland. After an outing which Burne-Jones made with three others, there is a trip back into London by means of a hired fly because one of the party, Ellen Terry, has suddenly taken against the train and refuses ‘to get into the nasty thing’. And when Burne-Jones becomes a regular guest at country house parties, Fitzgerald reminds us how icily cold such houses could be, ‘so that the ascent to the bedroom, candle in hand, was like an Arctic expedition’. We learn that once back in London, the artist took to meeting his young women in the heated Palm House at Kew Gardens. No wonder Georgie at one point goes in search of a country retreat where her husband can be removed from the fray of life. She travels to Brighton, turns her back on it, and walks over the Downs to Rottingdean. Here she finds an empty house on the village green which is promptly bought. One of its attractions was that the view from the back looked on to the Downs. From the front, the biographer notes, ‘you could see the solid little grey church, which had survived gales and fires and even the restorations of Gilbert Scott’.
Fitzgerald’s narrative repeatedly excites with the interest that surrounds Burne-Jones’s artistic development. She takes us inside the studio, identifies recurrent themes, tracks commissions and recognises the importance of exhibitions, particularly those held at the Grosvenor Gallery where the rich brocades and theatrical décor set off his art to perfection. ‘From that day’, his wife writes, with reference to its opening exhibition in 1877, ‘he belonged to the world in such a sense that he never had done before, for his existence became widely known and his name famous.’ Less happy was his relationship with the Royal Academy of Arts, from which he eventually resigned; and at the famous Whistler