‘The Red-haired Girl’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

Set in 1882, this story tells of four young artists, impecunious and idealistic, who set out to paint ‘en plein air’ in a French fishing port, previously unvisited but chosen hopefully. They are British but have studied in Paris under an uncongenial tutor called Bonvin. The port, when they arrive, proves unsuitable in every way, with the result that three of them end up painting each other indoors, while the fourth, Hackett, lodging at the grim sounding Hotel du Port, manages to persuade the waitress serving him, the ‘red-haired girl’, to act as his model.

Penelope Fitzgerald had the virtue of conveying much while saying little. Perhaps only a female writer could describe her female character as “built for hard use and hard wear”, while mentioning the intrusive effect of her “rump” in the room of limited space in which Hackett, sitting alone, is served his fish-based meals.

Hackett is pompous and patronising but, we are given to understand, not unkind. He would like his model to wear a red shawl, but such a thing is beyond her means. She can only pose in her lunch break, and frustrates him further by insisting on doing crochet while he sketches and paints. Previously silent, she takes to muttering resentfully and at length during the sittings. Subsequently Bonvin pays an unexpected visit to the port, only to criticize Hackett’s efforts in devastating terms. Then the red-headed girl disappears, and Hackett is left to seek a reason.

Greater minds than mine have drawn firm conclusions about the ending of this story, but Fitzgerald is too subtle, some might say too perverse, to deal in clean endings. Which leaves me speculating. Also destined, I’m sure, to return to it again and again.

First published in the Times Literary Supplement, 1998 and then in the collection The Means of Escape, Flamingo – Harper Collins, 2000

‘The Means of Escape’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

This was Fitzgerald’s only short story collection, perhaps she’s better known as a novelist and biographer. But what a collection! This story is set in 19^th century Van Diemen’s Land (present day Tasmania); Alice Godley is a young woman living with her family near a penal colony who encounters an escaped convict. Fitzgerald’s genius at evoking specific times and places is fully in evidence here, and it has a perfectly earned twist at the end.

First published in The Means of Escape, Flamingo, 2000

‘At Hiruharama’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

Reading aloud remains important. Publishing has been a way of doing this. I used to read aloud to a friend who for more than forty years ran a tiny bookshop in Notting Hill, more shed than shop, when she was in a care home and we knew from the first few paragraphs whether or not we wanted to carry on. Penelope Fitzgerald flew past that test. A number of the review quotes on her short novels express both deep admiration and bafflement – and that’s another test the writing I like best has to pass: however much I study it, I cannot work out how it’s done. I’ll offer ‘At Hiruharama’ from Fitzgerald’s posthumous collection of stories, The Means of Escape: genealogy, a remote homestead in New Zealand (“Don’t picture a shack, though. There were two rooms, one with a stove and one with a bedstead, and a third one at the back for a vegetable store”), a home birth for which the doctor arrives late but not too late to rescue a twin daughter the father had put in the waste with the afterbirth – “whereas the first daughter never got to be anything in particular, this second little girl grew up to be a lawyer with a firm in Wellington, and she did very well” – and Brinkman, visiting, who is hungry:

Two more women born into the world! It must have seemed to him that if this sort of thing went on there should be a good chance, in the end, for him to acquire one for himself. Meanwhile, they would have to serve dinner sometime.

The receptionist on Sunday afternoons at the care home where I read this story aloud was a Polish woman called Mrs Boyle. I said to her: ‘Maybe we were married, once.’ She gave me long look: ‘I don’t think so.’

First published in New Writing, Minerva/Arts Council, 1992; collected in The Means of Escape, Flamingo, 2000

‘At Hiruharama’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

I have in the past written at length about Fitzgerald, and called her “the greatest novelist of the 20th Century” (which I still stand by). She published her first novel at sixty-one, and wrote The Blue Flower, her masterpiece, when she was eighty. Her only book of short stories, The Means of Escape, was published in 2000, the year she died. ‘At Hiruharama’ is a perfect example of her greatness within just a few pages – she transports you to a different time and place; in this case New Zealand at the time of the first English settlers.

The story is framed as a flashback, and the shifts in perspective – from Tanner, one half of the couple who have started a life in the remote New Zealand countryside, to their nearest neighbour, who comes the nine miles distance’ for dinner the night Tanner’s wife is giving birth – are just brilliant. Fitzgerald never wastes a word, and the world is built up detail by detail, like Tanner driving into town to buy rock salt and a sack of millet, and a book taking a year to arrive from England by post. If you’re looking for somewhere to start with Fitzgerald, I could recommend about four of her books, but if you only want a short story, then go for this.

First published in the anthology Infidelity, Chatto & Windus, 1993. Collected in New Writing 4, Vintage, 2004 and The Means of Escape, Flamingo, 2000. Listen to AS Byatt read it here

‘The Axe’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

I read all of Penelope Fitzgerald’s fiction for the first time last year. Her novel The Gate of Angels, set in a Cambridge college in 1912, contains a spectacular pastiche of an M.R. James-style chilling tale. Rather than close the narrative however, I have instead opted for ‘The Axe’, one of the first things Fitzgerald wrote. It has several elements in common with the other stories I have selected here – if you have read it, they will be obvious – but the twist on this occasion is there is no twist; no one is coming to help the narrator or the reader.

In narrative at its purest or most eventful we do not understand but are the narrative.’

This is an open ending. And so is this. They are, I think, the way to go.

First published in The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1975, and in The Means of Escape, Flamingo, 2000, now Fourth Estate, 2016