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The life and times of that elusive, original miracle worker, the English novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, have been brilliantly captured by Lee, previously the author of masterly portraits of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton. Growing up steeped in literature but sidetracked by the vicissitudes of life, Fitzgerald published her first book at 58 and did not become famous until she was 80. But her fiction, when it finally emerged, had a tamped-down force and intense compression, as if the decades-long wait had worked its own clarifying, crystallizing magic.