With the death of Penelope Fitzgerald in 2000, the literary world lost one of its finest, most original, and most beloved authors. Completed just before her death, THE MEANS OF ESCAPE was Fitzgerald’s first new book since the best-selling THE BLUE FLOWER. Never before have her short stories been collected in book form, and none of them has ever appeared in the United States.
THE MEANS OF ESCAPE showcases this incomparable author at her most intelligent, her funniest, her best. Like her novels, these brilliant stories are miniature studies of the endless absurdity of human behavior. Roaming the globe and the ages, the stories travel from England to France to New Zealand and from today to the seventeenth century. Uniting them is a universal theme: the shifting balance between those who are in positions of power – by wealth, status, or class – and those who are not. THE MEANS OF ESCAPE memorializes a life and a writer guided by a generous but unwavering moral gaze.