The Blue Flower

First published in 1995, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower is a luminous, quietly unconventional novel set in late eighteenth-century Germany, tracing the early life of Friedrich von Hardenberg, the poet and philosopher who would become known as Novalis. Against the austere domestic world of his aristocratic family and the intellectual ferment of German Romanticism, the young Fritz falls passionately in love with Sophie von Kühn, a girl of twelve whose unassuming nature resists the idealised image he begins to make of her. Their unlikely engagement unfolds alongside philosophical debates, family obligations and the everyday business of living, as Fitzgerald brings the great abstractions of the age into intimate contact with its kitchens, gardens and sickrooms.

Inspired by historical documents yet alive with imaginative freedom, The Blue Flower explores the tensions between idealism and reality, poetic longing and ordinary happiness, and the distance between loving another person and loving an idea of them. Fitzgerald’s compressed, delicately ironic prose gives her characters an extraordinary vividness, allowing humour and sorrow to coexist without sentimentality. The novel’s title evokes the blue flower of Novalis’s unfinished Heinrich von Ofterdingen, an enduring emblem of Romantic yearning and the search for the unattainable. Awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997, this final novel is widely regarded as one of Fitzgerald’s finest achievements, a singular work of historical fiction that makes the intellectual origins of Romanticism feel startlingly human.

From the book

“A word of advice. If, as a young man, student, you are tormented by a desire for women, it is best to get out into the fresh air as much as possible.”

— Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

On The Blue Flower

“The Blue Flower is one of the strangest and freest books ever written.”

— Joan Acocella, The New Yorker