Penelope Fitzgerald’s Beginnings: The Golden Child and Fitzgerald’s Anxious Relation to Detective Fiction

Penelope Fitzgerald’s first novel The Golden Child is often considered apart from her subsequent novels, mainly because it is detective fiction. Though her uncle, Father Ronald Knox, was a well-respected master of this genre, Fitzgerald came to it with certain misgivings, which were especially pronounced when she considered its limitations against the achievements of modern fiction. However, those elements of the detective genre that may be found in The Golden Child did, along with the underlying interest in the question of authority, carry forward into her own more modern achievements in the novel.