I once opened a magazine to an article that began, "Everybody hates an Anglophile," to which I answered, "No, but everybody does hate a ______." Still, I understood what the writer meant. For many Americans, England remains the river of myth and history that branches into so many smaller rivers, including our own. We adopt its traditions; we claim a stake in its literary achievements. But some of us haven't faced facts. If the modern UK bears little resemblance to the country of Masterpiece Theater, and if the queen now hands out CBEs to people like Mick Jagger—well, we Anglophiles have the luxury of being an ocean away.

For the generation that came of age in the Twenties and Thirties, the older Britain was like an elderly relative, still present but fading fast. Novelist Penelope Fitzgerald describes such a world in an autobiographical essay from her posthumous collection The Afterlife. Remembering her childhood in Sussex, Fitzgerald writes,

From time to time Lady Denman, the most important benefactress in the neighborhood, took me out for what was then called a joy ride in her chauffeur-driven motor-car … . To me it was bitterly disappointing. You could see so much from a trap, where you sat high up above the fields and hedges, which seemed to be snatched away from the side of the road as the horse pounded forward. Not quite as good as a trap, but better than kind Lady Denman's Daimler, was a ride home on the last cow when they were brought in for afternoon milking. You had to sit sideways because a cow's backbone is as sharp as a rail and the view was limited, but the movement was delightful.

Fitzgerald, born in 1916, was the daughter of humorist and poet Edmund Knox, aka "Evoe" of Punch (he was the editor of the magazine from the Thirties through World War II). Her literary childhood was simultaneously old-fashioned and modern. Both her parents were products of Victorian vicarages, and, once children were born, they settled down into the old domesticity. Poetry, still widely popular in England, was the family trade, along with writing in general; even the Knox children scribbled away, confident of being published. Not far from this "homely" literary atmosphere, however, was the harsher climate of Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury was happy to lift its stock by selling out the icons of the 19th century (Lytton's Strachey's Eminent Victorians was to Florence Nightingale as that whoopie cushion was to your 4th grade teacher: unfair but effective). Fitzgerald's Uncle Dilly was a close friend of Strachey and also Maynard Keynes, but she refers to her mother and father's world, in contrast, as "Georgian."

"Georgian" is a mostly forgotten term for a literary movement that was progressive but also romantic and accessible. The writers' names remain familiar: D.H. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, and G.K. Chesterton all appeared in the first collection of Georgian poets—a volume that sold an amazing 15,000 copies on publication. The publisher of that book, and patron of British poets generally, was Harold Munro, owner of the famous Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street. Nearly every great modern poet and many now forgotten passed through the Bookshop at some point, including the eccentric Charlotte Mew, whose biography Fitzgerald would later write. Children were also welcome; Christina Knox bought colored rhyme sheets at the Bookshop to decorate the nursery walls. "Although Harold and Alida [Munro] were," Fitzgerald says, "in their different ways, rather intimidating for a young child … cats, kittens, and dogs were needed as intermediaries; everything they published for children was successful."

The Poetry Bookshop closed in 1935, and there's something fascinating in Fitzgerald's report of a rumor that some "children of a racecourse tough" who lived next door took the rhyme sheets and stamped on them. It sounds so much like a scene from one of her own books, where the most defining element, whether in fiction or biography, is a preoccupation with failure. In prose that is unfailingly bright, spare, and quotable, Fitzgerald writes of characters unlucky and unappreciated, marooned in this world and destined for obscurity, yet still dignified in the ways that count. There's the would-be bookseller driven out of business by shallow aristocrats in The Bookshop; the young teacher in At Freddie's who has no skill or purpose except to adore a woman who only pities him; and of course Charlotte Mew, who Thomas Hardy incorrectly predicted would be remembered long after her contemporaries, and who committed suicide by drinking Lysol.

Failure and disgrace were things that Fizgerald knew well from her own lifetime of picturesque and semi-comic troubles. Though we admire her success now, it's shocking to think that she only began to write seriously at the age of 58, with a biography of Edward Burne-Jones. From then until her death in 2000, at the age of eighty-three, she wasted no time. Her next two decades were prolific in output and critical acclaim, bringing her a Booker Prize (for Offshore, drawing on her experience living with her children on a houseboat at a time when money was scarce) and a National Book Critics Circle Award (for The Blue Flower, a novel that some call her masterpiece, centering on the life of the German poet Novalis).

I confess, I don't love Fitzgerald's novels as much as I think they deserve. I see all of their virtues: the craftsmanship, the planning, the unmistakable voice behind nearly every sentence. But that same voice can create a distance, I think, between a narrator and a reader. And there are times when her narrative is so dry and spare (in Human Voices, for instance, where we're expected to identify characters by their bbc acronyms, which is hilarious but confusing) that the characters seem remote.

But these are matters of taste, and I find plenty to love in Fitzgerald's other writing, including her insightful and generous criticism, much of which can be found in The Afterlife. Her posthumously published short stories (The Means of Escape) are strangely fascinating, and her recently published letters (And So I Have Thought of You) reveal other sides of her: a young woman who showed great early promise (she was Tolkien's pupil at Oxford); who became overwhelmed with what Dorothy L. Sayers would have derisively called "personal concerns" (raising children); and who, unlike so many British intellectuals, remained quietly churchgoing and Christian. Though Fitzgerald didn't write much about her own faith, we can look for the roots of it in the book of hers that I like best: The Knox Brothers, a wonderful composite biography of her father and her three eccentric uncles.

Fitzgerald begins this story of her extended family with her two bishop grandfathers. Her paternal grandfather, Edmund Knox, was the son of evangelical and Quaker parents; Knox was a brilliant classics scholar at Cambridge who later summed up his own evangelicalism as "the conviction that God loved [me] 'as an actual fact, that must take first place in my life.' &hellip ; Secondly to look at the Bible as a personal message from God to the individual soul &hellip ; 'to read it daily with a resolve to hear what God had to say to me that day.' " It would be hard, even today, to come up with a better, simpler statement of evangelical faith. While still a tutor at Merton College, Knox married the daughter of Thomas French, an Anglican missionary to India who became the Bishop of Lahore. Bishop French seems to have stepped from the pages of the Book of Acts. At the age of 64, he left his family in England and set out for North Africa, determined to bring the gospel to the Arab peoples. According to Fitzgerald, "He had no authority or backing. His destination was the whole Arab world, simply to tell them, even if no one accepted it, that Christ loved them and had died for them." After living for a while as an itinerant holy man, he died and was buried at the foot of a cliff by the Bay of Muscat.

This is the background that Fitzgerald paints for her readers before she tells the story of Bishop French's grandsons, the four sons of Edmund Knox, who, as Bishop of Manchester, became widely known for his ministry to the impoverished and working classes. Each of the Knox brothers, born in the 1880s, was expected to carry this family legacy of piety and brilliance into an intense period of cultural, religious, and technological evolution; each, in turn, would have his unique way of dealing with it. For the oldest, Eddie (Fitzgerald's father), there would be poetry, humor, and affection to carry him into the new century—not so much religion, though it was never his nature to upset his father's world. For the second brother, Dillwyn (Dilly), the changes created more disruption. Eccentric and brilliant (as a cryptographer, he helped to crack the Nazi Enigma code, shortening World War II), Dilly would have a violent reaction against faith, first at Eton, where he formed a friendship with John Maynard Keynes, and then at Cambridge, where he associated with Lytton Strachey's Apostles. The rejection of Christianity that came so easily to his friends required more effort—almost an evangelical conviction—for the grandson of Bishop French. Dilly "felt the need," says Fitzgerald, "to justify his faith—since his refusal to believe was nothing less than a faith by an appeal to reason. His skepticism was not logical; it came to him in the form of blazing indignation, a vision of Christianity as a two-thousand-year old swindle … . Yet more treacherous was the fact that Dilly &hellip ; could not forget or unlearn the words of the Authorized Version of the Bible, which had been interwoven since childhood with his daily life."

It was left to the younger two brothers to take up their father's religious vocation, but in ways the Bishop struggled to understand. Wilfred, deeply affected by the poverty of the lower classes, became an Anglo-Catholic (and some would say socialist) priest, eventually helping to form the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, a brotherhood dedicated to living in poverty and service. His high church convictions disturbed his father, but that disturbance was nothing compared to what happened when Ronnie, the youngest and "favorite" son, converted to Roman Catholicism after a bitter internal struggle. Ronnie's decision put a chill on his relations with the Bishop, but family loyalty endured even that strain, and Monsignor Ronald Knox went on to become a Christian scholar, mystery writer, radio dramatist, and translator of the New Testament. He gave the homily for G.K. Chesterton's Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral, and no less than Evelyn Waugh would write his biography, following his death in 1957.

A composite biography of such different personalities sounds impossible, but Fitzgerald identifies the one thing the brothers all shared: "a distinctive attitude to life, which made it seem as though, in spite of their differences, they shared one sense of humor, and one mind." She traces the development of that common attitude to the wild, tribal days of childhood, when the brothers wrestled as one under the nursery tables, memorized Bradshaw's Railway Guide, wrote to Conan Doyle to point out errors in his Sherlock Holmes stories, and, after the early death of their mother, began "to resemble savages; speaking Greek and Latin."

"It was a memorable experience to go to Gunter's teashop with Ronnie and Eddie," Fitzgerald writes, recalling an afternoon years later with her father and uncle, when Ronnie began to enthuse over Henry Vaughan's "Peace" while tackling meringue with a fork:

"My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged sentry
All skillful in the wars …"

Ronnie, chasing the crumbs, objected to the half-rhyme, country and sentry, and to the unlikeliness of one sentry guarding a whole boundary. The text must be wrong. Mightn't Vaughan have written,

"My soul, there is a fortress
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged porteress …"

Eddie immediately rejected the fortress; it was too menacing; why not a teashop?

"My soul, there is a caterer's
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a Gunter's waitress …"

At the false rhyme, Ronnie half-rose from his chair in agony. The tea was brought … . Other customers stared in amazement. So much did the words and assonances of the English language mean to the Knox brothers.

It's the fate of some individuals to act out the history of an era on a small stage, and the fate of their children to see life as a record of vanished joys and melancholy partings—but to be glad for it, all the same. Themes of sadness and loss play through all of Penelope Fitzgerald's work, but most movingly in The Knox Brothers. "When I was young," she writes in the forward, "I took my uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else in the world was not like them … . I miss them all more than I can say."

Which is something a great many readers might say about her.

Betty Smartt Carter writes fiction and teaches Latin in Alabama.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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