The English writer Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) didn’t publish her first book until she was nearly 60 and wasn’t much noticed, at least in the United States, until she was in her 80s. Many found her easy to overlook and easy to condescend to. She tended to comport herself, as Julian Barnes, an admirer of her novels, put it, like “some harmless, jam-making grandmother who scarcely knew her way in the world.”  You condescended to Fitzgerald at your peril. Her compact novels are shrewd and bruised, full of intensities of feeling. “Offshore” (1979) won the Booker Prize, and “The Blue Flower” (1995) the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was nobody’s ditsy aunt. She was a steely woman who lived a strange and altogether remarkable life, one that Hermione Lee unpicks with sympathy and wit in “Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life,” her excellent new biography.  Fitzgerald was born into an eccentric and intellectual tribe. Her father, Edmund Knox, was the editor of Punch, the venerable satire magazine. His three brothers followed such unusual paths (one, Dilly Knox, was a Cambridge don and a code breaker during World War II) that Fitzgerald later wrote a group biography, “The Knox Brothers” (1977). Christina, her mother, sometimes wrote for The Manchester Guardian. Fitzgerald grew up, she said, “dipped in ink.”  Her nickname, which she kept for life, was Mops. She spent her childhood in London, went to prep schools and mostly loathed them. Ms. Lee delivers the squirming details. At the Wycombe Abbey School, one of the “more brutal customs was the public notification, on the school notice board, of the termination of friendships.”  Fitzgerald entered Oxford in 1935. She was clever, hazel-eyed and much desired; the ratio of men to women at the time was six to one. She picked up another nickname: the Blond Bombshell. She studied with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and ran with a fast set known as Les Girls.  Some found her brusque and dismissive. Others prized her utter refusal to be dull. “A story circulated around Oxford that she had gone to a party with one breast bared,” Ms. Lee writes, “and had stayed that way, nonchalantly, throughout the evening.” At Oxford, she read the classics. “We didn’t feel the need to study modern literature,” she wrote. “We imagined we were going to write it.”  World War II bent her plans and everyone else’s. Fitzgerald went to work for the BBC, where the editorial policy was “to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible.” She later wrote a very good novel, “Human Voices” (1980), set at the BBC during the war. She also wrote film reviews and other things for Punch.  She married a dashing Irish soldier, Desmond Fitzgerald, and they had three children — a son and two daughters. For a while, all was well. The couple hosted memorable cocktail parties and ran a well-regarded cultural magazine, World Review, that published nearly every living writer who mattered, including J. D. Salinger a year before “The Catcher in the Rye” came out.  But money ran low. The magazine suspended publication. Desmond, who had never seemed the same after the war, had trouble returning to life as a lawyer. He began to drink. He was disbarred for stealing from colleagues. The family fell into poverty.  The long central section of this biography, about the family’s deep financial woes, is riveting. Desmond was hapless and unreliable, leaving Fitzgerald to raise her children more or less alone. The family was tossed out of its house and went to live on a black, hulking, decrepit barge on the Thames River, an experience Fitzgerald later mined in “Offshore.”  The barge was grim, dark, leaky. There was no stove, no way to do laundry. At low tide it canted on stinking mud flats. The family was told to emit wastewater — and to use the toilet — only while the tide was going out. The barge eventually sank. (Fitzgerald lost nearly everything.) They rescued their cat, which was clinging to the mast.  Things got worse. The family lived in homeless shelters, then for many years in public housing. Fitzgerald was too proud to ask her father for help. She took her children into restaurants, Ms. Lee writes, to eat the free bread and olive oil before pretending to dislike the menu and going somewhere else to repeat the charade. She began to teach school, which she did for 26 years, from her mid-40s until she was 70. Desmond found work at a travel agency.  “A profile of Penelope Fitzgerald in these years might describe her as a middle-aged teacher,” Ms. Lee writes, “recovering from a traumatic period of homelessness and deprivation, living in a dreary council estate in south London with a disgraced alcoholic husband in a dismal low-paid job, her children coming and going from school and university, her early ambitions to be a writer catastrophically thwarted, her life obscure.”  She began to write in the off hours, sometimes on the back of her school papers. (She was a good and funny if strict teacher. If one of her students used the dread word “overall” in a paper, she would draw a pair of overalls in the margins.) Her first book was a biography of Edward Burne-Jones, the British artist and designer, which appeared in 1975. Many other books quickly followed.  Fitzgerald could be a prickly pear. One of the best things about Ms. Lee’s biography is that we’re allowed to warm to her while being made consistently aware of her complicated and vaguely rude nature. She had a maternal instinct but wasn’t a hugger or kisser of children, her own or anyone else’s. As an adult, her son sought professional help for anxiety attacks because he felt he could never live up to her standards.  She was warm to those she liked, condescending to those she didn’t. She was furiously competitive, and cheated at croquet and board games. As a teacher, she was frequently grouchy. She never mellowed. A writer who served with her on a prize panel found her, Ms. Lee says, “irritable, perverse and ungenerous.” There are hints that she may have been a pocketer, when the occasion presented itself, of other women’s nice underwear and scarves.  In her fiction, Fitzgerald saw herself and others plain. It’s a cliché of discourse about biographies to remark that a good one (sometimes even a bad one) will send you racing back to read the subject’s works. In this case, it happens to be true in a mighty way. This book complicates Fitzgerald, messes her up in all the right ways. Best of all, Ms. Lee makes a strong and complex case for her fiction.  The finest description of that fiction came from Fitzgerald herself. She most wanted to get at, she said, “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?”  Illustrated. 488 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.  A version of this review appears in print on November 19, 2014, on page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Editor’s Daughter, Tempered by Homelessness, Picks Up Her Pen. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
Hermione Lee’s biography “Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life” paints Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, as a complicated human being who battled through difficult times to begin her career as an author when she was in her late 50s.