Christopher J. Knight s Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction is a study of the British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 2000), attending to her nine novels, especially as viewed through the lens both of "late style" (she published her first novel, The Golden Child, at age sixty) and, in her words, of "consolation, that is, for doubts and fears as well as for naked human loss." As in Shakespeare s late, religiously inflected, romances, the two concerns coincide; and Fitzgerald s ostensible comedies are marked by a clear experience of the tragic and the palpable sense...