 Cover of first edition | |
| Author | Penelope Fitzgerald |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Published | 1990 [1] |
| Publisher | Collins [1] |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 167 [1] |
The Gate of Angels is a 1990 historical novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It is set in 1912 at St Angelicus, a fictional Cambridge University college. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Fred Fairly, a Junior Fellow of St Angelicus ('Angels'), a (fictional) Cambridge college, is a physicist whose research focuses on the exciting modern field of quantum theory. As Fred cycles along the Guestingley Road in the dark, an unlit farmer's cart pulls out of a gateway into his path, causing him to crash into a stranger - a young woman by the name of Daisy Saunders. Both are knocked unconscious, and are taken in by the wife of Professor Wrayburn who lives nearby. Noting that the young woman wears a wedding ring, she incorrectly assumes that the pair are husband and wife and she puts them into the same bed to recover. On coming round, Fred immediately falls in love with Daisy, but she leaves without giving an address and he has no way of locating her.
Daisy is in fact an impoverished young woman from South London, who has been working towards a nursing position at Blackfriars Hospital. She is single but wears a wedding ring to fend off unwanted male attention. At the time of the accident, she was cycling with Thomas Kelly, a seedy journalist, who quickly made himself scarce.
While Fred is recuperating in a nursing home, Daisy returns to Cambridge and gets a job at the local asylum. She visits Mrs Wrayburn, quickly realises that the household chores are a burden to her, and offers to take them over in return for lodging. As soon as Fred learns of her return, he proposes marriage. Daisy says that she will consider it.
The driver of the farmer's cart that caused the accident has not been found and this draws the interest of Dr Matthews, Provost of St James and teller of ghost stories. It also draws the attention of the local police who open an investigation. In the ensuing trial, Fred, Daisy and Mrs Wrayburn are called as witnesses. While Daisy is in the witness box, the police unexpectedly introduce Thomas Kelly, whom she denies knowing. But Kelly, determined to cause Daisy damage, testifies that he was waiting for her to come to him at a local hotel where rooms are rented out by the hour. Fred is horrified. He leaves the courtroom and waits in a nearby cafe for three hours until Kelly emerges. When he does, Fred knocks him unconscious.
Following the trial, Daisy loses her job. She responds indignantly to Fred's questioning and their relationship appears to be at an end. Daisy says goodbye to Mrs Wrayburn and with no job and no money walks the several miles back to the station for a train to London. After losing her way, she finds herself outside a side gate of Fred's college, St Angelicus, which mysteriously stands open for only the third time in the college's long history. She hears a cry, goes in and helps the blind master of the college who has fainted. The incident has taken only five minutes - a delay just long enough for her to run into Fred, who is returning from a physics lecture.
Fitzgerald's inspiration for the opening of the novel came when she saw through a Cambridge bus window some cows in ecstasy over willow branches that had been broken off by strong winds; she viewed this as an instance of reason giving way to imagination in 'this orderly University city'. [2]
Fitzgerald was familiar with the Cambridge of the 1910s, having researched it for The Knox Brothers (1977), a history of her Knox relatives. Her uncle, Dillwyn Knox had been a classical scholar there, not a physicist, but like the Fred of the book had had a passionate attention to proofs and exact detail; he also like Fred had as a young man suffered a loss of faith that he had tried to shield from his father. [3]
Dillwyn Knox had been a student and Fellow at King's, whose Provost at the time, M. R. James, was - like the Dr Matthews of the novel - a medievalist, palaeographer and author of ghost stories. [4] Fitzgerald explained that "I set my novel in the Cambridge of 1912 because that was the height of the so-called 'mind/body controversy' with the scientists of the Cavendish in controversy with professing Christians, championed by James ... The ghost story is there to give atmosphere to the anti-materialists of Cambridge, who don't believe that physics can explain everything." [5]
The central event of the book, the bicycle crash of mutual strangers who wake up after the accident in the same bed, is based on an incident reported by Burne-Jones. [6] [7]
Fitzgerald has stated that The Gate of Angels is her only novel with a happy ending. [8]
Contemporary reviews of the novel were long and enthusiastic, with John Bailey speaking of her 'mesmeric insouciance' and Sebastian Faulks likening it to being taken in a ride in a peculiar kind of car where everything works beautifully but, halfway through and with exhilarating results, "someone throws the steering wheel out of the window". [9]
Louis B. Jones for The New York Times Book Review noted that "In this novel, atoms and spooks have equal epistemological status". [10]
In his Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald (2004), Peter Wolfe noted that the book explores the Victorian themes of good, evil and responsibility. [11] Fitzgerald being "[t]oo accomplished to go heavy on the signals", the book's strength lies in what is withheld and implied. [11] And, its "irony and deadpan wit impart a quiet intensity that make other novels look soggy and loose". [12]
Writing in 2010, Frank Kermode praised the work for its wealth of period detail, and opined that "The density of implication provided by this short novel is remarkable ... one senses a developed interest in the mysteriousness of the story, the exploitation of a new skill, which is to arrange for the story to project another story, less definite, more puzzling, than the first-hand narrative itself". [13]
Fitzgerald's biographer, Hermione Lee, noted that the novel masquerades as a light, comical love story set in Edwardian times, while also raising - but deliberately not answering - questions about the nature of belief, relativity and truth. [14] Lee held the book to be the most feminist of all of Fitzgerald's novels (though noting that the author did not use that categorisation), dealing as it does with themes of women's struggles, the abuses against them, and their need for solidarity. [15]
The novel was shortlisted for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Prize and for the Booker Prize. [9]
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
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Penelope Mary Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among "the ten best historical novels". A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."
Our Mutual Friend, written in 1864–1865, is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining savage satire with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, quoting the book's character Bella Wilfer, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life".
Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox, CMG was a British classics scholar and papyrologist at King's College, Cambridge and a codebreaker. As a member of the Room 40 codebreaking unit he helped decrypt the Zimmermann Telegram which brought the USA into the First World War. He then joined the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS).
Dame Hermione Lee, is a British biographer, literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.
The Blue Flower is the final novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald, published in 1995. It is a fictional treatment of the early life and troubled relationships of Friedrich von Hardenberg who, under the pseudonym Novalis, became a foundational figure of German Romanticism.
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Where There's a Will is the eighth Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout. Prior to its publication in 1940 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., the novel was abridged in the May 1940 issue of The American Magazine, titled "Sisters in Trouble." The story's magazine appearance was "reviewed" by the FBI as part of its surveillance of Stout.
The Bookshop is a 1978 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel was made into a film by Isabel Coixet in 2017.
Aladdin is a brand notable for its line of character lunchboxes including Hopalong Cassidy, Superman, Mickey Mouse and The Jetsons. Today, Aladdin continues to be a food and beverage products brand and is owned by Pacific Market International, LLC of Seattle, Washington and Aladdin continues to be a kerosene lamps and wicks products brand and is owned by Hattersley Aladdin Ltd of the United Kingdom.
Wilfred Lawrence Knox (1886–1950) was an English Anglican priest and theologian, one of four brothers who distinguished themselves. After leaving Oxford with a first-class honours degree in classics, Knox soon began working with the poor of London's East End, and then studied for the priesthood. After brief parish work, he was warden of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd from 1924 to 1940, and chaplain and fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He approached his New Testament studies as a Hellenist, and wrote several books on Paul the Apostle and other aspects of ecclesiastical history from that angle. He also wrote books explaining Anglo-Catholicism and the Christian way of life.
The Golden Child is a 1977 mystery novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald, her first published work of fiction. Written while her husband was terminally ill, and partly for his benefit, the novel offers a satirical version of the 1972 Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum, and pokes fun at museum politics, academic scholars, and Cold War spying.
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At Freddie's is a 1982 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. The last of her novels drawing directly on her personal experiences, it focuses on an august but shabby London stage school for children, TheTemple. Fitzgerald had herself been a general studies teacher at the Italia Conti stage school. The school in the novel is known as Freddie's after its elderly principal Freddie Wentworth, a character partly based on that of the impresario Lilian Baylis. The book received mixed reviews on its first UK publication, and on its 1985 appearance in the US.
Innocence is a 1986 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. Set in Italy, it is a comedy of manners concerning the marriage of the young daughter of an old but impoverished aristocratic family, and a young neurologist who has tried to cut himself off from emotion. "Innocence" is the first of a group of four historical novels written by Fitzgerald at the end of her career. It was her first book to be published in the USA.
The Beginning of Spring is a 1988 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. Set in Moscow in 1913, it tells the story of a Moscow-born English-educated print shop owner whose English wife has suddenly abandoned him and their three children. The novel was shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize.