Book of a lifetime: The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

From The Independent archive: Katharine McMahon revisits a Russian doll of a novel, where the history of Moscow and England is effortlessly woven with individual lives and nobody is as they seem

Penelope Fitzgerald in 1990 and the first edition cover of her novel (The Times/HarperCollins)

When I was quite a new writer, my editor gave me a copy of The Beginning of Spring. I sat in the Underground aglow with pleasure; the book felt like a talisman, writing to which I should aspire.

As a child, I studied the covers of my favourite books, critical if they didn’t live up to the contents. The cover of The Beginning of Spring is stunning and mysterious – a serene portrait of mother and tightly swaddled infant, and a background of flowers, the lattice of a window and possibly something else, indefinable. The colours are deep golds, reds and yellows.

The detail is from an English picture by Frederick Cayley Robinson, and a photograph of St Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow. Try as I might, I cannot make out the cathedral. And this enigmatic cover sums up the entire book, which is so spare yet so dense that though you re-read and re-read, you cannot comprehend everything that’s there.