Award-winning illustrator James Albon, working with reductive lino cuts, provides images that reflect the shifting nature of Fritz himself: energetic and melancholy, light and dark. She published it in 1977, the year after he died, when she was sixty years old. She wrote her first novel, The Golden Child (my review here ), to entertain her husband during his final illness. Reading The Blue Flower is an ethereal and addictive experience, sure to be just the beginning of a literary journey with an underrated yet exceptional writer. The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (1995) Mariner Books (2014) 225 pp P enelope Fitzgerald’s literary career, which I’ve touched on before, is a marvel. In his introduction to this edition, Neel Mukherjee describes Fitzgerald’s books as ‘slim, fleet-footed, at once weightless, like air, and immense with the worlds they contain’. Its also Fitzgerald at her best elegant, inventive, hilarious, unsparing. Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel is a modern masterpiece, a feat of immersion and sleight of hand it is effortlessly light, reducing the great distance of history to little more than the turn of a page, whilst containing unexpected depths of poetry at its heart. The epigraph to The Blue Flower is a statement from Fragmente und Studien, 1799-1800, written by F. ‘The Blue Flower is a model of what historical fiction can be at its best when the radical otherness of other times is not merely acknowledged but made integral to the fictional experience.

Its also Fitzgerald at her best - elegant, inventive, hilarious, unsparing. His family, alternately bemused and charmed, do their best to both hinder and aid this ultimately tragic betrothal. The Blue Flower is a model of what historical fiction can be at its best - when the radical otherness of other times is not merely acknowledged but made integral to the fictional experience. Brilliant and idealistic, his heart is captured by the young Sophie von Kuhn, an artless child he nonetheless describes as his ‘true Philosophy’. The Blue Flower tells of the early life of Fritz von Hardenberg, the young man who would become the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis.

The blue flower fitzgerald