‘Reality Has Proved Treacherous’

“What was she doing in Mexico?” asks Hermione Lee in her biography of Penelope Fitzgerald.1 In October 1952, decades before Fitzgerald became one of the most celebrated British novelists of the twentieth century, she and her five-year-old son, Valpy, sailed from England to New York City and took a bus south of the border, where they remained until January 1953. Fitzgerald’s husband, Desmond, and their two-year-old daughter, Tina, stayed behind. Fitzgerald was pregnant with their third child, Maria, who was born a couple of months after she and Valpy returned.In a 1980 essay called “Following the Plot,” Fitzgerald briefly describes her time in Mexico, which she says she wanted to use as the basis for a novel. The voyage, she writes, was proposed by “two old ladies called Delaney” from a Mexican city named Fonseca. The women lived comfortably, in spite of recent economic reforms, on the proceeds of the family silver mine…. Their relations in Ireland had died, they were alone in the world, and it was hoped that because of some distant friendship they might take kindly to my son and leave him all their money. The Fitzgeralds’ stay quickly turned into a farce. The old women “were drinki...