The Art of Fiction No. 241

Penelope Lively was born to British parents in Cairo in 1933, where her father was assistant to the director of the National Bank of Egypt. She spent the first twelve years of her life in the Egyptian capital, a childhood “no more—or less—interesting than anyone else’s,” she writes in her 1994 memoir, Oleander, Jacaranda, though it was marked by the notable characteristic of being British in Egypt and “learning how to perceive the world in the ambience of a quite different culture.” That childhood came to what Lively calls “an abrupt and traumatic end” in 1945, when she was taken to England and enrolled in boarding school, “a grim rite of passage.” Lively has never written extensively about her adolescence. “Ah yes, that extraordinary business of the malevolence of teenage girls,” she said when asked about this. “It would have been a good thing to have written about. I don’t think I could recover it now, it’s too far away, but I really should have.”

This unwritten story is easy to imagine, especially as Lively began her career writing books for children. This was in the early seventies, when she was a young mother and married to Jack Lively, a political theorist whose academic posts took his family to various universities in Great Britain: Swansea in Wales, then Sussex, and later Warwick and Oxford. Lively’s first novel for adults, The Road to Lichfield, was published in 1977. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, as was her 1984 novel According to Mark. Moon Tiger, the story of an elderly woman looking back over her life, won the Booker Prize in 1987. To date, Lively is the only writer to have been awarded both the Booker Prize and the Carnegie Medal for outstanding children’s fiction, which went to The Ghost of Thomas Kempe in 1973.

Along with her industrious writing career—more than twenty books for children, seventeen novels, five collections of short stories, five volumes of memoirs, and an introduction to landscape history—Lively used to travel widely with the British Council and sat on the board of the British Library. Now, at eighty-five, she lives at a slower pace. Her most recent book, Life in the Garden, guides readers through the various gardens she’s loved and tended, from that of her childhood home in Cairo to the small plot behind her Islington townhouse where she’s lived alone since Jack’s death, in 1998.

It was in this house our interviews took place; I visited Lively twice in the spring. On the first occasion—a chilly February morning—we chatted over coffee in the bright upstairs sitting room, elegantly decorated with works by Lively’s artist aunt, Rachel Reckitt. When I returned for our second conversation a couple weeks later, Lively showed me into her study on the ground floor. The room was full of evidence of ongoing work: books were stacked in front of the fireplace, and neat piles of papers sat atop a desk and on a shelf beside her chair. She was working on an introduction to a forthcoming volume of poetry for children, as well as writing a review of Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje, for the New York Times. Coincidentally, only three months later, she and Ondaatje found themselves pitted against each other for the Golden Man Booker Prize. When the short list was announced, I sent Lively a card to offer my congratulations. Her response was imbued with the same polite modesty I noted during our conversations: she was greatly surprised, she wrote, to find Moon Tiger unexpectedly “resurrected” in this way.

INTERVIEWER

Given that the presence of the past is an abiding theme in your work, was there anything in your family history that suggested you would grow up to become a writer?

LIVELY

Absolutely not. There had never been anyone in my family who’d written. The one thing that I do think had an effect on me was the rather curious education I had. I was educated at home by somebody who started as my nanny and then reinvented herself as my governess, though she herself had left school at sixteen. She worked from a do-it-yourself home-education kit called the Parents’ National Educational Union, which actually, when I look at it now, is exemplary. It was training in comprehension and how to express oneself in writing.