Valerie Fitzgerald

Background

Valerie Fitzgerald was born on January 1, 1927, in India. She is the daughter of a British Army officer. She moved to England in 1947, then Switzerland, Ireland, Kenya, and Italy.

Education

Fitzgerald attended schools in India and England.

Career

Valerie Fitzgerald tried her hand several times at fiction - none of it very good - before finally settling down to write Zemindar which appeared in 1981. This novel is drawn from her personal experience. Her grandmother lived through the Indian mutiny so vividly recreated in this splendid novel. And when Ms. Fitzgerald's soldier father was posted to Luchnow during World War II, she spent her adolescent years in the city and her summers on a zemindari estate similar to Oliver Erskin's fabulous realm.

In 1982 appeared her next work "Bantam". After that, she finished her writing career because of illnesses, a growing interest in watercolour painting and other events. She did, however, become a book reviewer for the Washington Post, the now-defunct Ottawa Journal and other papers.

Achievements

• Valerie Fitzgerald's novel, Zemindar, won in 1980 the Georgette Heyer Historical Novel prize and in 1982 the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.

Works

More photos

• novel

  • Zemindar

    (The book is based on her grandmother’s experiences in Ind...)

    1981

Views

Fitzgerald thinks that the British and, by turn, the American fascination with India is rather simple. She doesn't think there's any deep psychological reason. She admits it isn't comparable to America's involvement with Vietnam and the emotional scars that that has left behind. A much more cogent way of looking at it is that the British have suddenly realized that they have their own equivalent of the perennial western. Britain has an immense, extremely colorful, diverse history of the empire, and people are just beginning to realize that there are jolly good stories there for the telling.

Quotations: "l have no recollection of just when, or more important, why l set about telling the story of the Siege. l suppose it was because l realized l had the right background - and because no one else, as far as I knew, had ever tried it", - speaking about her work Zemindar

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Peter Andrews, talking about Valerie Fitzgerald's work "Zemindar": “Fitzgerald has clearly shown that she has the stuff to be a superior historical romance novelist.”

Connections

Fitzgerald has two children - Josephine and Desmond.

child:

Josephine

child:

Desmond