The Bookshop

Hopkins has been recommending Penelope Fitzgerald for a while, so I've finally read one, The Bookshop. Turns out, from Wikipedia, that Fitzgerald is a daughter/niece/biographer of the Knox brothers! And that she herself worked in a bookshop!

Written in 1978, The Bookshop is set in 1959 in a small fishing village. The book details the decision of the protagonist, Florence Green, a widow, to open a book shop. It's a very simple novel of manners that ends more tragically than you would expect, but with no drama at all. The story is told very simply, but with dour wit. (For instance the book shop is housed in a haunted old house--Fitzgerald recounts and Florence Green observes the hauntings in a stoic fashion.)

The novel praises and traces the development of Florence Green's courage. But the funny thing is, this courage also leads to the downfall of her book shop. So it really is a tragedy, but a tragedy that says, "Eh, such is life."

Florence Green on shelving used books:

"There was an elaborate [Everyman] endpaper which she had puzzled over when she was a little girl. A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. After some hesitation, she put it between Religion and Home Medicine.
The right-hand wall she kept for paperbacks. At 1s. 6d. each, cheerfully coloured, brightly democratic, they crowded the shelves in well-disciplined ranks. They would have a rapid turnover and she had to approve of them; yet she could remember a world where only foreigners had been content to have their books bound in paper. The Everymans, in the shabby dignity, seemed to confront them with a look of reproach."

(Given her attention to the old Everyman endpaper, it didn't surprise me to learn, also from Wikipedia, that she published a biography of the Pre-Raphaelite, Edward Burne-Jones.)