In the decade following the publication of Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984), Penelope Fitzgerald wrote a remarkable quartet of novels: Innocence (1986), The Beginning of Spring (1988), The Gate of Angels (1990) and The Blue Flower (1995). Set in Italy, Russia, England and Germany, and ranging in time from the late-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, these four works are often described as ‘historical novels’ as though history were the most important thing about them. But Fitzgerald herself disliked the term, pointing out that ‘All novels, in fact, are historical’. By this she meant that novels only tell stories about things that have already happened (even Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's Brave New World are told in the past tense); and also, more formally, that the novel, like music and drama, is a temporal art form unfolding in time and history. I prefer, then, to call these four works Fitzgerald's ‘late’ rather than historical novels, partly because history is decidedly not what defines them, and partly to signal their difference – less autobiographical, more boldly experimental in narrative form and style, and even more intensely concerned with profound questions of body, mind and spirit – from Fitzgerald's ‘early’ novels.

These four late works are the peak of Fitzgerald's achievement as a writer. The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Blue Flower, unaccountably overlooked for the Booker, won the US National Book Critics’ Circle Award. All four have been praised for their uncanny evocation of particular times and places, for their structural economy and innovation, for their bodying forth of big ideas about life, death and the nature of reality in the guise of stories of romance and mystery. In these novels, in which fictional characters mingle with famous names from history, including Antonio Gramsci, Tolstoy, Ernest Rutherford, Goethe, Fichte and Schiller, Fitzgerald ranges far beyond the experiences of her own life. Yet perhaps not so far, upon closer inspection. The plots of all four novels present versions of thwarted desire: Fred's epiphanic longing for Daisy in The Gate of Angels; Salvatore and Chiara's tempestuous love story in Innocence; Frank's craving for Lisa in The Beginning of Spring, or at least his desire for something other than his marriage; Fritz's idealized yearning both for Sophie, his ‘heart 's heart’, and for revelation in The Blue Flower.