13/365: The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald Rating: ★★★★ Publication Date: January 1, 1978 Genre: fiction Pages: 160 ReRead?: No Project: Project 365 In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.

It is easy to be fooled by the title and plot summary into thinking that this will be a charming and quirky story about a bookshop on the English coast, in the manner of an 84 Charing Cross Road by Helen Hanff.

The Bookshop is, at a minimum, poignant. It might even qualify as grim. I liked it a lot, even if the ending did break my heart a bit.

It is extremely well-written, with clear, economical prose. The main character, Florence Green, is a widow of reduced circumstances living in the hardscrabble seaside down of Hardborough – a name that could not be more apposite – on the coast in Suffolk County. Because I just finished A Fortnight in September, I had to check to see where Suffolk was, in relation to Bognor Regis, in Sussex. They are not too far apart, both on the Eastern coast of Southern England. Hardborough seems to possess nothing of the liveliness and prosperity of Bognor Regis, however. Our dear friends, the Stevens family, will not be visiting it anytime soon.

Florence decides that she will take her small inheritance and open a bookshop in Hardborough. Things go well for a bit, as she establishes herself in The Old House and begins to stock her shelves. There is a peak with the decision to purchase 250 copies of Lolita to sell in the bookshop. This seemed to me an astonishing number of copies of the same book for her small community, but controversy sold in 1959, apparently, as it sells in 2025, and she makes a packet. This causes her to become overly confident because, as it turns out, there is a storm brewing in the background of which Florence is blissfully unaware.

That’s where the book took a turn for me. I was invested in the success of the bookshop and of Florence. I wanted it to turn out well. Friends, it does not turn out well.

Florence is an unassuming woman of immense dignity, and I appreciated that, but in our year of the lord 2025, reading a book where the wealthy and powerful cavalierly squash someone so vulnerable for no good reason and without caring at all about the impact of their machinations on her, well, I’m not going to lie, it was rough. I closed the book with a feeling of desolation and fury at the injustice of it all.

I will definitely read more Penelope Fitzgerald. An author who can so deeply invest me in one of her characters has something worth exploring.