Penelope Fitzgerald (Lincoln, 1916 - London, 2000) began writing in 1975, when she was 58 years old. She debuted with a biography of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, and later wrote another about her father and uncles (the Knox brothers). Two years later, she published the novel The golden child, a detective story set in an antiquities museum that satirizes the bureaucracy and absurdities of the art world. This was followed by other splendid works such as Innocence (1986), set in Florence with Gramsci as a secondary character, and The beginning of spring (1988), which narrates the life of an Englishman exiled in Moscow.