Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) published nine novels, all of them in the last twenty years of her life. Described as one of Britain’s finest postwar writers, she is known for the mastery of her technique and for the austere and original talent exhibited in her work. Offshore (1979) received the Booker Prize, and her final and greatest novel, The Blue Flower (1995), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Fitzgerald’s personal life—she raised three children alone and in poverty—was characterized by a combination of resilience and stoicism. “Women,” she said, “are always interrupted.”