Penelope Fitzgerald; English Novelist Won Booker Prize

British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, who embarked on a literary career late in life and produced a highly regarded body of work that brought her the National Book Critics Circle Prize and Britain’s Booker Prize, has died in London at age 83.

Already 60 when the first of her nine novels was published, Fitzgerald wrote in an ironic, spare and richly comic style. Critics praised her sense of detail and her clear observations of human nature.

Richard Eder, writing some years ago in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, called Fitzgerald’s work “so precise and lifting that it can make you shiver.”

Wendy Lesser, an authority on the British novel, said, “There was a wit to the work that seemed to emanate from her characters themselves and not merely from their author.”

Fitzgerald’s last novel, “The Blue Flower,” the story of an up-and-coming artist, later to become the poet-philosopher Novalis, and his romance with a 12-year-old girl won the National Book Critics Circle prize in 1998. It defeated heavily favored books including “Underworld” by Don DeLillo and “American Pastoral” by Philip Roth. It also surprised industry experts by selling more than 100,000 copies in the United States.

Fitzgerald was born to a literary and academic family; her father, Edward Valpy, was the editor of the humor magazine Punch. She was educated at Oxford and worked in the Ministry of Food, which handled rationing in Britain during World War II.

After her marriage in 1953 to Desmond Fitzgerald, a major in the Irish Guards, she worked as a clerk in a bookshop and her family lived in a barge on the Thames. Events like these showed up in Fitzgerald’s fiction. Her novel “The Bookshop” recounted a courageous entrepreneur’s defiance of the prejudices of her community. That book, her second novel, was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1978, the year before she won for “Offshore,” a novel about life on a barge on the Thames River.

In an autobiographical sketch some years ago, Fitzgerald described what books meant to her.

“I’ve heard my novels described as ‘light,’ but I mean them very seriously,” she wrote.

Fitzgerald, who also wrote three biographies, died Friday of complications from a stroke, her family announced.

She is survived by three children. Information on funeral services was not immediately available.