[In the following review, Annan discusses the amount of detail Fitzgerald manages to put into The Blue Flower.]

The German Romantics were drunk with ideas, and Novalis was the drunkest. He is the hero or anti-hero of this biographical novel. He died in 1801, aged twenty-eight, leaving a few beautiful religious poems which many Germans know by heart because they read like hymns and are sung in church. His mystical poems can be as bizarre and embarrassing as anything written in the seventeenth century; one of them imagines a kind of Eucharist in which the sea turns into heavenly blood and the rocks into delicate palpitating flesh and the universe embraces and eats itself up in a voracious orgy of love. Those who partake of the feast, the poem concludes, appreciate the food. Novalis’s love lyrics and occasional poems are conventional, but his mystical-philosophical essays and fragments made a great impression on his own and later generations. His unreadable novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen is about a medieval knight who dreams of a blue flower and sets out to seek it. He doesn’t find it, for one thing because the novel is unfinished. But that in itself is symbolic, and the blue flower became and remains the symbol of the Romantic movement.

Novalis’s real name was Friedrich von Hardenberg. Penelope Fitzgerald calls him Fritz. He was born in 1772, the second of eleven children. All of them died before their father, an impoverished Saxon country gentleman who tried to make ends meet by running the Prince’s salt mines in the little town of Weissenfels. He was a convert to the Herrenhut Brotherhood, a mystically oriented Puritan sect. Fritz was sent to the Brethren’s boarding school when he was nine and expelled when he was ten, because “he insists that the body is not flesh, but the same stuff as the soul”. That is what Fitzgerald tells us. The Blue Flower is closely based on the German edition of Novalis by Samuel, Mähl and Schulz, which includes not only all his correspondence, but also every contemporary reference to him that they have been able to trace. Fitzgerald uses this material with cunning, mixing verbatim chunks with invented descriptions and conversations.

It was customary for young men to attend several universities. Fritz went to Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg, and studied history, philosophy, natural science and law—pretty well everything on offer. Jena was where it was all happening in the 1790s. Fritz heard Schiller and Fichte lecture. Everyone admired his intellect and particularly the speed with which he absorbed knowledge. The scientist Johann Ritter spotted that he was a mystic: “For him there is no barrier between the seen and the unseen. The whole of existence dissolves itself into a myth.” His fellow student Friedrich Schlegel, soon to become the chief theoretician of the Romantic movement, was bowled over by him: “a young man from whom everything may be expected. He is thin and well made, with a beautiful expression when he gets carried away. He talks three times as much, and as fast, as the rest of us.” A portrait in the museum at Weissenfels shows that beautiful expression, “the brilliant, half-wild gaze”. The sitter looks like a fawn, not startled so much as prepared to be, probably by some new intellectual insight or spiritual revelation. It’s a shame the publisher didn’t use it on the dustjacket, instead of the portrait of a Symbolist lady.

Fritz needed to earn his living, and after Wittenberg his father sent him to learn business administration with an acquaintance of his. Coelestin Just was a magistrate and inspector of taxes in Tennstedt, another small Saxon town. Fritz was industrious and just as quick to pick up practical procedures as philosophical concepts. He boarded with the Justs, and made a confidante of their niece Karoline, who kept house for them. She was five years older than he was, and when he fell in love he told her all about it.

It was love at first sight, and the object of it was twelve-year-old Sophie von Kuhn. Fritz met her when Just took him to see the Rockenthiens, another huge family like his own, but richer, jollier and less aristocratic. Sophie and several sisters were the children of Frau von Rockenthien’s first marriage. Punning on her name, Fritz called Sophie “my Philosophy”, and he seems to have looked on her as a cross between a Platonic other half and a spirit guide. He also confessed to erotic thoughts about her in his diary. Fitzgerald does not mention them. Sophie was not particularly enthusiastic about getting engaged; she wanted to go on romping with her friends. Eventually she accepted his ring, and wore it round her neck because the engagement had to be kept secret from old Hardenberg, who thought the Rockenthiens inferior socially.

Sophie was lively but not very bright. She could barely write a letter. What she liked were presents and fun. “She had”, as Fitzgerald beautifully puts it, “the remorseless perseverance of the truly pleasure-loving.” She wasn’t even particularly pretty. Two miniatures of her show a double chin, and Fitzgerald has Fritz’s favourite brother Erasmus point it out to him. In her account, Fritz’s love for Sophie horrifies Erasmus and breaks Karoline Just’s heart. But Sophie developed tuberculosis. After several operations without an anaesthetic, she died two days after her fifteenth birthday. That was in March 1797; in April, Erasmus died of the same disease, and Novalis followed four years later. By that time, he was engaged to a professor’s daughter. The deaths are listed with the deaths of three more Hardenberg siblings in an Afterword. The novel itself ends in 1797 with Sophie’s death.

It is fastidious, funny, sad, clever, and very engaging. The tragic tale is told with a dryness that has humour built into it, as though Jane Austen instead of Mrs Gaskell were writing about the Brontës. The tension between Fitzgerald’s cool and the alien turbulence of most of her characters adds piquancy. And yet she draws one right into the milieux she describes: at first, they seem uncouth, gothic and grotesque; but gradually, like a receptive au pair, one accepts the strange scene and customs, and comes to care very much for the weird foreign families among whom one finds oneself at Weissenfels, Tennstedt and the Rockenthiens’ estate at Grüningen. The Blue Flower is like Anna Karenina (though only in this respect) in being a novel of households.

Fitzgerald never lets the sense of foreignness go. She puts in a lot of German words, even when there are adequate English equivalents. For instance, because the Hardenbergs are poor, Fritz rides a sorry old nag. The German for nag is Gaul. Fitzgerald makes everybody call Fritz’s horse “the Gaul”, as though it were Asterix’s mount. She uses the opposite technique for the same purpose, translating German usage literally into English. So Fritz’s maverick little brother becomes “the Bernhard”, and Sophie’s married elder sister “the Mandelsloh”. These devices are amusing, but she could manage perfectly well without them. Her details are brilliantly chosen: the fees at the Herrenhut school, for instance, are eight Talers for a girl and ten for a boy, because boys eat more and need Latin and Hebrew grammars. Her descriptions, almost adjective-free except for a few colours, pull one into the scene: “By September carts were beginning to make their way into Jena from the pinewoods with logs for the coming winter. Branches from the tops of their loads scraped against the windows in the side-streets, which were littered with twigs like a rookery.”

As for the characters, each one, however briefly he or she appears (and the whole book is a miracle of concision, cramming three teeming households and a great deal of research into 224 pages), is as visible and audible as the twigs scraping the windows. Fitzgerald tells you what they eat (goose, eel, cabbage, plums), what they read (if they read), and what they think about the French Revolution. She is sympathetic towards all of them, even difficult old Hardenberg. As for Novalis himself, she acknowledges his gifts and his charm, and goes along with his mystic experiences: the apparition in the Weissenfels graveyard, and the luminous transfiguration of the Justs’ parlour. She lets him speak his manifesto a few days before Sophie’s death: “As things are, we are the enemies of the world, and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement. … I love Sophie more because she is ill. Illness, helplessness is in itself a claim on love. We could not feel love for God Himself if he did not need our help.”

But I don’t think Fitzgerald loves Fritz. When Sophie lies dying, he decides he can’t bear it and leaves her to her practical, dull, staunch sister. The Mandelsloh has courage; she is the real hero along with the equally terre-à-terre and stoical Karoline, who finds Goethe’s Mignon “very irritating”. “She is only a child”, says Fritz, “a spirit or a spirit-seer, more than a child. She dies because the world is not holy enough to contain her.” “She dies because Goethe couldn’t think what to do with her next”, says Karoline. I wonder what Fitzgerald will do next. Her eclectic choice of subjects for fiction and for biography is always a welcome surprise.