The Blue Flower, Penelope
Fitzgerald’s last and most masterful novel, is a departure from the
comedies of manners for which she was compared with Jane Austen.
A different kind of book altogether, The
Blue Flower is both a metaphysical work and a historical novel.
It fictionalizes the life of the Germany philosopher poet Friedrich
(Fritz) von Hardenberg, who came of age at the time Romanticism was
emerging. The title comes from Fritz’s composition in which a young man
longs for the blue flower that "lies incessantly at his heart, so that
he can imagine and think about nothing else.”
Fritz, the oldest son of a noble family, inexplicably falls in love
with a 12-year-old girl without wealth, beauty, education, or culture.
Calling her unusual book a novel “of sorts,” Fitzgerald blended into
the theme of the mysterious flower Fritz’s passion for the 12-year-old
Sophie, his philosophical ideas, details of the life of his and other
families, and a social history of provincial Germany in the late
18th-century. Although the novel was praised by critics, it is probably
not to everyone’s taste. Fitzgerald is a detached observer and
high-brow writer who assumes readers have some understanding of German
Romanticism and are content not to hear an explanation of Fritz’s
mystical love.
After the events of the novel, Fritz gained fame as the German Romantic
poet and philosopher “Novalis.”
The Blue Flower won the 1997
National Book Critics Circle Award after it was published in the United
States.
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