Of all the novelists of the last fifty years, there is no one I more regret not having met than Penelope Fitzgerald. Thls volume, a collection of eighty-four separate pieces (reviews, lectures, and introductions to a number of mostly minor classics), has both intensified my regret and provided some compensation. Reading it has been like having a series of brief conversations with the author. And each conversation has left me with some insight or witticism I have wanted to share with others – for example, this sentence about Stevie Smith: ‘She presented to the world the face that is invented when reticence goes over to the attack and becomes mystification.’

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