A Squeeze of the Hand

I discovered Penelope Fitzgerald's work in 1999.

- BY JESSICA FRANCIS KANE

My husband and I had just moved to London for his job, and I, homesick in a rental flat near Battersea, was trying to write but not having much success. On his way home from work one night, my husband stopped in a bookshop and picked out a book to cheer me up. He didn't know the author, but he thought I might like the story because it was set along the Thames near where we were living.

That book was Offshore, Fitzgerald's 1979 Booker Prizewinning novel, and I adored it. I read all Fitzgerald's other novels in short order. She was living in Hampstead at the time, and I dreamed of bumping into her. I never did, but her work, more than any other writer's, became a deep source of inspiration for me.

When Hermione Lee's biography of Fitzgerald came out in 2013, I went to see Lee speak at the New York Public Library and felt a jolt of connection when I heard that night that