The Root and the Flower

Set in the war-torn world of Mughal India and first published in the gathering darkness of the 1930s, the three novels collected in The Root and the Flower are stories of intrigue, murder, and romance; of Tantric abandonment and Buddhist renunciation; of emotional delirium and spiritual adventure. This enthralling visionary trilogy is, as Penelope Fitzgerald remarks in her introduction, a "strange masterpiece," and one of the unsung glories of modern literature.

L.H. (Leopold Hamilton) Myers is the author of The Orissers (1923), The Clio (1925), Strange Glory (1936), and The Pool of Vishnu (1940), which was intended to complete the story told in The Root and the Flower. The son of a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research, Myers was deeply concerned with issues of spiritual transcendence and social justice; briefly active with the Bloomsbury Group, he later rejected what he judged the members’ insufficient regard for spiritual matters. He committed suicide in 1944.

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) graduated with honors from Somerville College, Oxford, and worked at a variety of jobs until, in 1975, she published her first book, a biography of the pre-Raphaelite master Edward Burne-Jones. She was the author of two other biographies and ten works of fiction, among them The Blue Flower, Human Voices, and The Bookshop.