The novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, who died on April 28th aged 83, was one of the most distinctive and elegant voices in contemporary fiction. Her novels, spare, immaculate masterpieces (few of them exceed 200 pages), divide into two sections; an earlier group loosely based on her own experiences, and a later group, in which she moves to other countries and periods. In 1979, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore.
Penelope Fitzgerald was the second child of Edmund George Valpy "Evoe" Knox and his wife, Christina Hicks, and was educated at Wycombe Abbey and Somerville College, Oxford, to which she won a scholarship. Her father was the eldest son of the Bishop of Manchester; her mother, the daughter of Edward Hicks, Bishop of Lincoln.
She inherited a habit of literature from her parents. Her father, who had wanted to write from his undergraduate days, was editor of Punch from the 1930s. Her mother, one of the first Somerville students, also wrote.
Penelope Fitzgerald delayed her own literary career until the age of 60, when she published Edward Burne-Jones: a biography (1975). She wrote two other biographies, a life of the poet Charlotte Mew, Charlotte Mew and her Friends; and The Knox Brothers, a composite study of her father and his three remarkable brothers, Dillwyn (classicist and cryptographer), Wilfred (Anglican priest) and Ronald (the famous Roman Catholic convert and apologist). All of them, she said, in explanation of her elliptical style, were given to understatement.
Her first novel, The Golden Child, which was written to divert her husband during his last illness, took the form of the classic detective story. It was inspired by the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum, as Human Voices was based on her war years in the BBC, and At Freddie's on her experiences at the Italia Conti stage school, where she taught in the l960s. The Bookshop recalls her years of living in Southwold, where she worked in a bookshop, and Offshore was based on her family's life on a rat-ridden barge at Battersea - which sank twice.
After that, she felt that she "had finished writing about the things in my own life, which I wanted to write about: then you must look and find other experiences, you must launch out."
In Innocence, she launched out to 16th and 20th-century Italy; then to Moscow in 1913, in The Beginning Of Spring; to Cambridge in 1912, in The Gate Of Angels; and to late 18th-century Germany in her story of the romantic poet and philosopher, Novalis, in The Blue Flower. This was probably her masterpiece; it won the American National Book Critics fiction prize in 1998, and helped introduce her to a wider American readership.
Penelope Fitzgerald has been compared in her qualities of social comedy and irony to Jane Austen. The comparison is just in many ways, but ultimately unsatisfactory, for she had a metaphysical quality which is less apparent in Jane Austen - and Jane Austen was not the only novelist of that period by whom she was influenced. She spoke with enthusiasm of the way in which Sir Walter Scott mixed up fictional and real characters, and this is reflected in the appearance of the dying Gramsci, in Innocence, and of Fichte, Goethe and Schlegel in The Blue Flower.
She married Desmond Fitzgerald, an Irish soldier whom she met at a wartime party, in 1941; he died in 1976. In 1996, she was awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature.
She is survived by a son and two daughters.
Penelope Mary Fitzgerald: born 1916; died April, 2000