New Voice, Old Body: the Case of Penelope Fitzgerald

In today's highly competitive publishing environment, the contemporary woman author cannot do without the media but instead must negotiate her status as a producer of writing and an object of visual consumption. She writes and is written upon—by agents, marketing departments, critics, fans, book reviewers, and journalists. In the crossroads of creation, image, and distribution, her body of work is never completely detached from the literal one. The physical and textual bodies of women authors have been appropriated to advance or heighten various social, theoretical, and national moments. In tandem, authors construct a persona for professional development, media publicity, and cult following. In literary criticism, however, even of the feminist materialist strain, there is, strangely, a dearth of detailed readings of the bodies of canonical women authors. It is as if such a practice in its objectification is complicit with values alien to the feminist agenda. What, though, may be revealed by reading the body of the woman author and examining correlations between the persona and the page? How may this practice lend an optic into national identity and gender politics? Further, what opportunities, complications, or paradoxes arise when a new voice pours from an old body? How does one market the elderly woman writer? How and why is a “late-blooming” woman writer appropriated by the media and to what tradeoff? Does this label, with its double-edge, its undertone of already past it, render her at a disadvantage, or do its inspirational implications—one can begin to write not just fiction, but prize-wining fiction, at a late age—balance the backhanded compliment?