Fitzgerald knows that to establish the horizon. But the Blue Flower of the title is only mentioned two or three times, in a quotation from the opening of Novalis unfinished novel HEINRICH VON OFTERDINGEN. 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. Ultimately, the book is about that ideal, or about the notion of reaching towards a romantic ideal, the blue flower, the distant horizon. 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. 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’.
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. His family, alternately bemused and charmed, do their best to both hinder and aid this ultimately tragic betrothal. 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.
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