The Blue Flower

Reading this book made me feel as if I was watching a great magician perform several impossible tricks.

It is both clever and funny, it teems with wonderful characters but never seems overstuffed, and it does what very few historical novels manage to do. We absolutely believe that the people are living their lives in the past (this really is Germany in the 1790s), but we also recognize them as our contemporaries.

I find it a magical book, lighter than air, a poignant, gorgeous love story that also satisfies the historian in me.

In real life, the Romantic German poet Novalis (1772-1801) fell in love with Sophia, a girl of 13, his exquisite  ‘blue flower’. In both prose and poetry he exalted their perfect relationship, till her early death shattered his dreams. In Fitzgerald’s chilling novel, Novalis’s idyll becomes a mad, warped obsession as the passionate lover completely loses touch with reality and retreats into his own weird world of introspection, to the dismay of those around him. The object of his adoration is an impassive, deadpan child,  soon grotesquely disfigured by illness, who dies without ever seeming truly alive. The washday scene,… show more.

It’s an unusual historical novel which opens with a scene of drying laundry, and this is a novel like no other. Set in late 18th Century Germany, it covers the student years of Friedrich von Hardenberg, who would later achieve fame as the Romantic poet Novalis. 

He becomes obsessed with Sophie von Kühn, a sickly (and very young) girl. They become engaged, but never marry, as Sophie dies of consumption a few days after her 15th birthday. The novel is named for Friedrich’s other obsession, a story he is writing in which a young man longs to see the… show more.

Biographical fiction treads a fine line: if it sticks too close to the known facts it can seem rather pointless, but if it strays too far from them it often feels dishonest. Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel about the early life of Friedrich von Hardenberg (better known as the poet Novalis) achieves the perfect balance. A moving love story, an immersive portrait of 19th century Germany, and a subtle meditation on the mystery of art, it is a work of soaring originality and tremendous beauty.