[In the following review, Herzog asserts that the spareness of Fitzgerald’s style and her ability to capture setting in The Blue Flower create a powerful effect on the reader.]

The late eighteenth century is fascinating not least because it was the era of the American and French Revolutions as well as the birth of modern notions of democracy. It was also the age when the modern ideas about heterosexual romance that still move, suffocate, inspire and torment women and men to this day were first fully elaborated and worked out. As Penelope Fitzgerald’s absorbing novel The Blue Flower makes clear, there were then—as now—winners in the game of hetero-love, people whose lives seemed effortlessly to fit the cultural ideal. There were also casualties.

Based on the early life of Friedrich “Fritz” von Hardenberg, who later became prominent as the Romantic poet Novalis, The Blue Flower is about a few of those casualties. Its organizing mystery centers on why Fritz would suddenly plunge into head-over-heels infatuation with a young girl of twelve, Sophie von Kühn, whom he has only met for fifteen minutes, but has already asked to marry him.

Fritz, in his early twenties, son of an aristocratic (but not wealthy), pious Protestant family in the German region of Thuringia, is a promising—indeed perhaps brilliant—student of philosophy. And yet he has, at least according to his brother Erasmus’ angry accusations, allowed himself to be taken in by a girl who is “stupid!” and “not even pretty … at twelve years old she has a double chin.” Fritz, however, is completely serene, secure that his transcendent feelings for Sophie are not figments of an inebriated imagination:

“I know that I am receiving moral grace. How can that be intoxication?” Fritz wrote.

Am I to be kept apart from her for
                              ever?
Is the hope of being united
With what we recognised as our own
But could not quite possess completely
Is that too to be called intoxication?
All humanity will be, in time, what
                              Sophie
Is now for me: human perfection—
                              moral grace—
Life’s highest meaning will then no
                              longer
Be mistaken for drunken dreams.

(p. 91)

For Fritz, Sophie is “my heart’s heart” and his devotion to her is unwavering.

The Blue Flower never fully resolves the mystery of what makes Sophie so enthralling to Fritz, but it gives plenty of clues to help us make up our own minds. The novel chronicles the evolution of their courtship, as well as the other relationships in which they are enmeshed. It ends with a haunting account of Sophie’s battle with tuberculosis—that most characteristic disease of the era—and, finally, with her death just two days after her fifteenth birthday.

For those readers familiar with German literature, the fact of Novalis’ seemingly irrational obsession with Sophie, and its impact on his work, may be standard textbook fare. But it scarcely matters what one might know of this story beforehand. Fitzgerald’s talent as a storyteller is to turn even the seemingly incidental moments of her tale about lovesickness in the 1790s into something wholly fresh.

One thing that particularly struck me was how much Fitzgerald tells us about the hard realities of life in the late eighteenth century. We learn along the way about the pigs’ snouts boiled in peppermint schnapps—a special treat for lovers at country fairs—the pigeon pies, pickled herrings, and soups made of beer, sugar and eggs, or of cows’ udders flavored with nutmeg. We hear that university students were perpetually drunk, and that when an admired professor was ill, students nursed him and emptied his bedpans. We discover that this faraway world too had its fair share of abortions, adulteries and divorces.

Fitzgerald subtly addresses the power imbalance between the genders. There is Fritz’ burdened mother Auguste, who “seemed always to be looking for someone to whom to apologise,” a woman terrified of unannounced visitors because then suddenly “everything was on top of you before you could pray for guidance.” Already totally intimidated by her own life, Auguste cannot really manage her household (she leaves that to her eldest unmarried daughter). Even going out into the garden alone in the evening is a daunting challenge. And yet, although the mother of seven and in her forties, she nonetheless gives birth to two more children—or, as Fitzgerald tartly puts it, “in the warmth of the great curtained patriarchal goose-featherbed … Nature’s provisions continued, so that last year Amelie had been conceived and born, and this year, Christoph.”

There is Karoline Just, five years Fritz’ elder, the unmarried niece and housekeeper of the man who is training Fritz in business management as he prepares for the solid and respectable career of salt mine inspector for the Prince of Saxony—work thought appropriate for the nobility. At the very least, Karoline is his intellectual equal, and Fritz confides everything in her. While she chops sausages and mends clothes, he enthuses about his latest deep thoughts.

Fritz makes clear that he wants only a friendship with Karoline, but he also, with unthinking narcissistic cruelty, flatters and flirts with her. Sharing drafts of his writing, he impatiently waits for her to help him interpret his own work.

“What is the meaning of the blue flower?”

Karoline saw that he was not going to answer this himself. She said, “The young man has to go away from his home to find it. He only wants to see it, he does not want to possess it. It cannot be poetry, he knows what that is already. It can’t be happiness, he wouldn’t need a stranger to tell him what that is, and as far as I can see he is already happy in his home.”

The unlooked-for privilege of the reading was fading and Karoline, still outwardly as calm as she was pale, felt chilled with anxiety. She would rather cut off one of her hands than disappoint him, as he sat looking at her, trusting and intent, with his large light-brown eyes, impatient for a sign of comprehension.

What distressed her most was that after waiting a little, he showed not a hint of resentment or even surprise, but gently shut the notebook. “Liebe Justen, it doesn’t matter.”

(p. 63)

Soon afterwards Fritz tells Karoline that “we are like two watches set to the same time, and when we see one another again there has been no interval—we still strike together,” and then blithely informs her that he has fallen in love with Sophie. For her part, Karoline masks her feelings for Fritz—and her heart keeps on breaking.

As Novalis, Fritz is perhaps best remembered for the slogan, “The world must be romanticized!” His poetry and prose, reacting against the classicism of Goethe, advanced a mystical spiritualism in which body and soul are united, there exists no barrier between life and death, and all things commune with each other. To some extent we see him already heading in this direction in the course of the novel, particularly when he rhapsodizes about the spiritual meaning and beauty of the most mundane objects. The Blue Flower also suggests that taking opium, in the form of laudanum, was routine. In a time more like our own the talk of Hardenberg and his friends might well be dismissed as only pseudo-deep—the ramblings of stoned sophomores, not the musings of the canonized philosophers and literati of German culture.

Simultaneously, however, Fitzgerald makes clear, without mockery, what it was about this era, its extreme provinciality and its yearnings and enthusiasms, that made these ideas so appealing. There was, for instance, the fierce authoritarianism of Fritz’ father, against which he rebels, as well as the constraining austerity of his childhood home. Fitzgerald does a deft job of capturing the anxiety about worldliness and sin that structured the Hardenberg family’s daily existence, without in any way allowing the reader to smirk at their worldview.

Penelope Fitzgerald’s spare and compressed style gradually grew on me. I especially found the later portions of this novel, about people who spent so much time reflecting on themselves and each other, thoroughly engrossing. Drawn extensively from the actual letters and diary entries of Hardenberg and his family and friends, a significant part of The Blue Flower's luminous eloquence is in fact their eloquence. But it is difficult not to be awed by Fitzgerald’s gift for distilling the essence from mountains of evidence, moving pieces around into unexpected combinations, imaginatively filling in gaps in the historical record, making these odd and occasionally unappealing historical figures speak at cross purposes and past one another, even while the juxtapositions of their casual remarks manage to convey worlds of meaning. The cumulative effect is heart-wrenching.