![]() In my home town of Battle, which is not entirely dissimilar to Fitzgerald’s fictional Hardborough, our excellent new local bookshop Rother Books was welcomed with open arms three years ago and continues to thrive. Indeed, the resistance Florence meets to her new shop is something that most of us would find unfamiliar. ![]() However, I don’t think Fitzgerald is really writing about the bookshop industry. An upbeat ending it is not.Īs someone who runs an antiquarian bookshop, Henry Sotheran Ltd in London, I feel all this in a very raw part of my soul. That is the last line of a book about a bookshop. Florence has to conclude that ‘the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop’. The arts centre is Mrs Gamart’s pet project, and the town of Hardborough falls into line behind her. At the end of the book, the formidable local matriarch Mrs Gamart manipulates her MP nephew into pushing through Parliament a bill specifically designed to close down Florence’s shop in favour of a local arts centre. ![]() It’s about English insularity, politics, the misuse of power and the headstrong persistence of hope, with Florence Green’s Suffolk bookshop a symbol for every newcomer who ever found their best intentions beaten down by suspicion and hidebound tradition. Just as most good books aren’t really about the things they say they are, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop (1978) isn’t really about a bookshop. ![]()
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