Tag: Hermione Lee

Don’t forget the narration

November 15th, 2025

Unfortunate are the adventures which are never narrated.

– Penelope Fitzgerald

I haven’t read any of her novels yet, but Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald biography is a gem. It’s about carrying on, even during life’s foibles and kicks to the shins.

Especially encouraging if you’re trying to cobble some unorthodox life together.

So how to narrate your adventures then? Keep a journal. Snap a photo each day. Blog. Record a lyric into your phone. Something.

Keep going.

Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 123
Be exceptional. Commonplace.

July 12th, 2025

It was clear to Willie and to Jean that Mops was exceptional. She was the only girl who kept a commonplace book; they used to talk about “Mops and her Book of Quotes.”

If you didn’t already need a reason to commonplace. “Mops” gives you another; it automatically makes you exceptional 🙂

It’s details like these that keep me returning to biography so often.

Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 38
Your consolations

July 10th, 2025

Her consolations were the poetry she knew by heart, and the sound of the sea.

– Hermione Lee, on Penelope Fitzgerald attending the Deerhaddnn School

Homesick? Lonely? Overwhelm? Recite a poem you know by heart. This is the balm, the antidote. The consolation.

If you don’t have a few memorized, begin today. Add them to your quiver. The sound of the sea, if you can get near enough is a bonus.

Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 35
Rhyme sheets on the wall

July 8th, 2025

Like that inaccessible landscape, her childhood rhyme sheets vanished, over time, into the distance. Later, she would collect others, and put them up on her own children’s walls, but all her life Fitzgerald regretted the loss of those first ones. In old age she wrote to a fellow enthusiast: “I’m perhaps the last person alive who used to go to sleep as a child with a coal fire and the PB rhyme sheets on the walls.”

It’s true you know. The images and words we hang on our walls remain inaccessible landscapes. Look at the art around you. The images, are they not portals to some glorious worlds? This doesn’t change as an adult. In adulthood one forgets.

Penelope Fitzgerald knew this.

Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 31
The Letters Gave in

April 6th, 2025

I began to read just after I was four. The letters on the page suddenly gave in and admitted what they stood for.

– Penelope Fitzgerald

Some descriptions are well…FIRE. As read from Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life.

Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 28
An index to the Knox Brother’s collective characteristics

December 8th, 2024

Bath, inspiration in; Bible, knowledge of; critical spirit; Edwardian; emotion at war with intellect; family feeling; fearlessness; foreign travel, distrust of; games, love of inventing rules for; generosity; honesty; intellectual severity; love, need for; pipe speaking; poetry, love of; rhyming, skill at; speaking ability; temper, loss of; tender-heartedness; transport, passion for forms of (railways, trams, bicycles, motor-bikes); understatement, tendency to.

As read from Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald, A Life

Writer Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote a biography on her father and his three brothers. Fathers and uncles aren’t the typical biographical portrait.

The structure of this index could be something to replicate. Quick notes on a new topic or city. Similar to Jack Kerouac’s sketches.

Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United Kingdom, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014. pg10

Tag: Hermione Lee

Don’t forget the narration

Be exceptional. Commonplace.

Your consolations

Rhyme sheets on the wall

The Letters Gave in

An index to the Knox Brother’s collective characteristics