In The Afterlife (Counterpoint), a collection of Penelope Fitzgerald's reviews and essays, readers discover that her early novels had strong autobiographical elements—At Freddie's (1982) was inspired by her days as tutor to child actors—but it's an impulse that gave way to "the temptation . . . to take what seems almost like a vacation in another country and above all in another time." What followed was her historical fiction, most notably The Blue Flower (1995), in which the German Romantic poet Novalis falls in love with a 12-year-old. It's to Fitzgerald's credit that this story of the logic-defying force of love reads as if it had been written by a contemporary of Novalis—that is, she achieves the best in first-person erasure.