ABSTRACT

Suspecting that her Duckworth editor Colin Haycraft did not truly think well of her second novel, The Bookshop (1978), even as it had been short-listed for the Booker Prize, Penelope Fitzgerald, in late 1978, approached Richard Ollard, at William Collins Sons and Company, about the possibility of publishing her next novel, Offshore. She had, in an early November 1978 letter to Haycraft, asked whether he thought another novel advisable. His telephone reply left Fitzgerald feeling hurt, and so, in a letter of 19 January 1979, she said her goodbyes to Haycraft and Duckworth: “I’d just like to say, having taken the advice, not to say instructions, you gave me to find another publisher for these novels, that I’m very grateful for the start which you and Anna gave me.—I’m sure you were right in saying no-one else would have taken them” (L 259).1 In reply, Haycraft claimed that he said no such thing,2 but the breach had been set in motion, and it seems likely that when writing to Haycraft on a Friday that she was in receipt of Richard Ollard’s letter from earlier in the week (Tuesday, 16 January 1979), extolling the virtues of Offshore:

I finished your book last night and tried to ring you this morning to say how admirable I think it is and what an extraordinary compass of novelistic gifts you box in so narrow a sea. It seems to me to have everything-dialogue, characterisation, tension, and the whole thing controlled by an elegant and apparently effortless construction. I do

congratulate you. Although nothing is less certain or more certifiably mad than the film industry, I shall certainly do what I can to get the book taken for film because it is a natural. Marvellous character parts, a setting that would be neither expensive nor difficult to reproduce and a plot that works.