At Freddie's: A Novel

by Penelope Fitzgerald, Simon Callow (Introduction)

Overview

“A jewel of a book.” —Daily Mail

It is the 1960s, in London’s West End, and Freddie is the formidable proprietress of the Temple Stage School, which supplies child actors for everything from Shakespeare to musicals to the Christmas pantomime. Of unknown age and provenance, Freddie is a skirt-swathed enigma—a woman who by sheer force of character and single-minded thrust has turned herself and her school into a national institution. Anyone who is anyone must know Freddie.

Filled with unique and hilarious insights into the theatrical world, At Freddie’s is a beguiling story for those of us who sometimes pretend to be something we are not.

“Love, fear, class, ambition, even death—it's all in here, but so elegantly presented that you've finished your plate before you even think to ask about the ingredients.” —National Public Radio

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544359482
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	10/14/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	281,382
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

PENELOPE FITZGERALD wrote many books small in size but enormous in popular and critical acclaim over the past two decades. Over 300,000 copies of her novels are in print, and profiles of her life appeared in both The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. In 1979, her novel Offshore won Britain's Booker Prize, and in 1998 she won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for The Blue Flower. Though Fitzgerald embarked on her literary career when she was in her 60's, her career was praised as "the best argument ... for a publishing debut made late in life" (New York Times Book Review). She told the New York Times Magazine, "In all that time, I could have written books and I didn’t. I think you can write at any time of your life." Dinitia Smith, in her New York Times Obituary of May 3, 2000, quoted Penelope Fitzgerald from 1998 as saying, "I have remained true to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?"

Date of Birth:

December 17, 1916

Date of Death:

May 3, 2000

Place of Birth:

Lincoln, England

Place of Death:

London, England

Education:

Somerville College, Oxford University, 1939

Editorial Reviews

"A work of immense poise and dignity, but warmth and humor, too... This is definitely one of the most charming - but strongly textured - novels anyone will read in a long while." Booklist, ALA

"Fiztgerald is a deft and nimble writer...[who] displays the English gift for understatement. Her apt phrases are tossed off casually; her humor is flicked at us airily. [At Freddie's] is intriguing to the end." The Washington Post

"Mrs. Fitzgerald's special talent is stylistic, a mannered comic dryness that relishes absurdities without dwelling on them too long: she moves at speed, is full of dry observations and inventions, and at her best is very funny." -- Anthony Thwaite Observer
 

From the Publisher