Penelope Fitzgerald wanted to call her 1990 novel "Mistakes Made by Scientists". On the other hand, she laughingly likened it to a Harlequin doctor-nurse romance. The truth about The Gate of Angels is somewhere in between. The doctor, Fred Fairly, is indeed a young Cambridge scientist, and the nurse, Daisy Saunders, has been ejected from a London hospital. If Fred is to win her love, he must make an appropriately melodramatic sacrifice–leaving the academic sanctum of St Angelicus, a college where all females, even pussycats, are banished ("though the starlings couldn’t altogether be regulated"). 

          Daisy, however, suffers from a very non-Harlequin malady, the sort found only in Fitzgerald: "All her life she had been at a great disadvantage in finding it so much more easy to give than to take. Hating to see anyone in want, she would part without a thought with money or possessions, but she could accept only with the caution of a half-tamed animal." Self- protection is certainly not this young woman’s strong suit, but we admire her endurance. At one moment, Fred points out that "women like to live on their imagination". Daisy’s response? "It’s all they can afford, most of them."