Innocence Fitzgerald, Penelope

Beautiful Chiara is smitten by the brilliant but penniless doctor Salvatore. Desiring the unwilling Salvatore as a future husband, she engages in a series of comic attempts to land her object of affection, only to create a greater chasm between the star-crossed would-be lovers.

Annotation:
A 16th-century tale and a modern one converge in this novel, set in Italy, about a midget noblewoman from the past, and a woman who falls in love with a doctor in the 1950s.

Author Bio

Penelope Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald's father was the editor of Punch, and she grew up in a lively, distinguished, and highly literary household. She received first-class honors at Oxford in 1939, was married in 1941, and had three children. She and her improvident, intermittently alcoholic husband lived in a succession of places that included an oyster warehouse, a seaside artists' colony, a houseboat on the Thames (which sank), and public housing. Over the course of 30 years, she held a variety of undistinguished jobs while she was raising her children, including one "carrying records about" at the BBC. As one of her daughters put it, "Many of the instances in her books are about people managing and coping and making do, and that comes from her own life." Fitzgerald wrote biographies, but she was most celebrated for her short, demanding, increasingly spare, and often autobiographical novels, which she did not begin publishing until she was 60. She began writing only when her own writer-father was dead and her husband was dying of cancer; she wrote, she said, "to divert him." Her 1980 novel, OFFSHORE, won the Booker Prize. Fitzgerald died at the age of 83, with her career in full bloom.

Praise

Threepenny Review
"What is remarkable about this tale...is the completeness of its Italianness, political, religious, moral, and physical....It is an exquisite mosaic, where every tiny piece is part of an intrigue and a world....Horrible tragedy is possible, and farce is omnipresent, both belied by the light, decorous storytelling." - A. S. Byatt Spring 1998

Product Attributes

Book Format:		Paperback
Number of Pages:		0224
Publisher:		Mariner Books

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Innocence (Paperback)

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