THE AFTERLIFE

Though Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, was surely a writer for her time, the English novelist and essayist (The Means of Escape, 2000, etc.) seemed most at home wandering through libraries devoted to late Victorian and Edwardian writers, many now forgotten.

This selection of essays, forewords, and book reviews introduces modern readers to some of them: the bookseller, poet, and editor Harold Monro, who asked in his will “for his ashes to be scattered at the root of a young oak tree, though only if the idea proved practicable”; George Moore, the Irish writer who, like Fitzgerald, “set himself to read everything”; the unhappy Bloomsburyite Dora Carrington, whose ashes none of that weird circle could remember scattering, if she had even been cremated in the first place; John Lehman, the editor who aspired to be a poet—though, as Fitzgerald remarks, “he produced eight collections in his lifetime, there was never any evidence that he was able to write good poetry.” Fitzgerald is a generally amiable critic, motivated by a passion for good books but aware of the effort it takes to write even an undistinguished one. Her sidelong journeys through the stalls and stacks, pointing out treasures and private passions, will delight those Virginia Woolf honored with the designation “the common reader,” who are, of course, none-too-common these days.