![]() ![]() This presents Frank with the urgent matter of finding someone to look after the children while he manages his printing business.įrank Reid is thoroughly English but is born and brought up in Moscow. However, almost immediately, Frank gets a call from the stationmaster to pick up his three children, Nellie has apparently decided that she can’t manage the children after all. The reasons for Nellie leaving are not really revealed and this development is as much a mystery to the reader as it is to Frank. When the novel opens, Frank Reid comes home to find that his wife Nellie and their three children – Dolly, Ben and Annushka – have left him. The novel is set in Moscow, Russia in the early 1910s – before the start of the World War I and the Russian Revolution – and is centred around an English family settled there. There is something quite wonderfully strange and compelling about The Beginning of Spring, one of the later novels in Penelope Fitzgerald’s oeuvre. ![]() In terms of style, The Beginning of Spring felt closer to the latter book. The Bookshop was more traditional, while The Blue Flower felt more elusive with much to read between the lines. ![]() I must admit, though, that having read them many years back, I have only a hazy recollection of the two and maybe a re-read somewhere in the future is in order. Until now, I had read two Penelope Fitzgerald novels – The Bookshop and The Blue Flower – both of which I had thoroughly enjoyed. ![]()
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