Penelope Fitzgerald
Lost her home on a sinking barge and published her first novel at sixty, winning the Booker at sixty-three
Penelope Fitzgerald was born in Lincoln into the Knox family, whose men were bishops, Bible translators, codebreakers and, in her father\'s case, the editor of Punch. She went to Oxford, took a first and was expected to do something remarkable. During the war she worked at the BBC and in 1942 married Desmond Fitzgerald, an Irish Guards officer who came home from the war drinking and never really stopped.
The next thirty years were a slow descent. A literary magazine the couple ran failed. Desmond, a barrister, was struck off in 1962 for forging signatures on cheques. With three children they moved to a leaky barge on the Thames at Battersea, which sank twice, the second time with most of their belongings in it; she came home from teaching to find the family homeless. They ended in a council flat in Clapham. She earned the family\'s living for years teaching at a crammer and a stage school, marking essays on the bus.
She published her first book, a biography of the painter Edward Burne-Jones, in 1975, at 58. Her first novel, The Golden Child, followed at 60, written to amuse Desmond as he was dying. The Bookshop was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978, and Offshore, about people living on Thames barges, won it in 1979. Critics were condescending; she was polite. Her last novels, set in Moscow, Florence and eighteenth-century Germany, were her best. The Blue Flower, published when she was 78, won the American National Book Critics Circle award. She died in 2000.