[In the following review, Dirda recounts the virtues of Fitzgerald’s Blue Flower.]

Penelope Fitzgerald brought out her first novel in 1977, when she was past 60; in the two decades since then her books have appeared regularly every other year or so; three titles—The Bookshop (1978), The Beginning of Spring (1988) and The Gate of Angels (1990)—made the shortlist for Britain’s distinguished Booker Prize, and Offshore (1979) took home the award. Many readers felt that at least one of her other books, Innocence (1986), was as good as or even better than these four. When The Blue Flower came out in England in 1995 it was chosen as “the book of the year” more often than any other by a score of distinguished writers and reviewers. In fact, Fitzgerald’s public admirers range from novelist A. S. Byatt (“How does she do it?”) to the eminent scholar Frank Kermode. On these shores Richard Eder, book critic of the Los Angeles Times, has called her “the best English writer who is at present at the prime of her power.” That phrase may be a little awkward, but there’s no mistaking the enthusiasm.

So why, one cannot help but wonder, is The Blue Flower appearing here as a paperback?

Doubtless our American publishers prefer to distribute only the truly timeless in hardcover, and a perfect work of art such as this one must naturally bow before the obvious superiority of the latest “Star Trek” tie-in. Perhaps, though, Mariner Books—a new division of Houghton Mifflin—hopes that a paperback edition may encourage readers, especially younger readers, to give Fitzgerald a whirl. Whatever the case, The Blue Flower is a bargain, a book to buy and salt away for vacation or to turn to gratefully at the end of a soul-destroying Washington workday.

Die blaue Blume, the blue flower—first imagined by the great German poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis—has long been a symbol of Romantic yearning, whether for easeful death or for some ineffable and transcendental ecstasy. In her novel Fitzgerald follows the general course of Hardenberg’s early life, providing cameos of his family, teachers, friends and employers. Even though there are 55 chapters (for a mere 225 pages) and nearly as many characters, the book never feels busy or hurried. Each character springs to life in a few sentences or a crisp turn of phrase. “Large though the house was, she always found guests a difficulty. The bell rang, you heard the servants crossing the hall, everything was on top of you before you could pray for guidance.” And so you have Fritz’s timid, always slightly bewildered mother, the Freifrau.

At the book’s heart lies the poet’s mystical, seemingly irrational love for the very young and rather plain Sophie von Kuhn—who will eventually die at 15. Although the novel touches on several aspects of German romanticism (the mystical, philosophical, folkloristic), the real pleasure of this text derives from its shrewd understanding of personal relations and from the elegant beauty of the writing.

Consider how deftly Fitzgerald suggests the Germanness of the setting with her very opening words: “Jacob Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend’s home on the washday.” Note, first, the double use of “not” to convey a formality and exactness verging on pedantry. Yet the real feather touch of genius lies, of course, in the insertion of “the” before “washday”: Immediately, the whole sentence takes on a purse-lipped Teutonic accent. Such nuances recur periodically, just often enough to evoke another time, a vanished world.

Where some writers like to build their effects slowly, Fitzgerald prefers a quicksilver economy that may sound a little bare outside her pages. One picks up the rhythm of the sentences, though, and comes to value minute, telling details. When Fritz returns from visiting a sophisticated city uncle, his brother Erasmus asks what was talked about at the dinner table: “Nature-philosophy, galvanism, animal magnetism, and freemasonry”—precisely the right late 18th-century topics for fashionable intellectual discussion. After a friend’s two fingers are cut off in an early morning duel, young Dr. Dietmahler tells Fritz to put them in his mouth. “If they are kept warm I can perhaps sew them back on our return.” More than a few Washingtonians will ruefully recognize their own experience in this observation about a soiree for blue-stockings and their admirers:

“The musical evenings and conversazione at Jena were crowded, but not everyone said brilliant things, or indeed, anything at all. Some of the guests stood uneasily, certain that they had been invited, but not, now that they had arrived, that their names had been remembered.”

Fitzgerald brings to vivid, flashing life servants and salt mine bureaucrats, both the august Goethe and a precocious little brother named Bernhard. The bookseller Severin, we learn, “had been poor and unsuccessful, had kept himself going by working very hard, at low wages, for the proprietor of the bookshop, and then, when the proprietor had died, had married his widow and come into the whole property. Of course the whole of Weissenfels knew this and approved it. It was their idea of wisdom exactly.” That last sentence encapsulates an entire bourgeois mentality. By contrast, could anyone be more romantic than the serious young painter, hired to create a portrait of Sophie? “He had determined to paint Fraulein Sophie standing in the sunshine, just at the end of childhood and on the verge of a woman’s joy and fulfillment, and to include in his portrait the Mandelsloh, her sister, the soldier’s wife, likely to be widowed, sitting in shadow, the victim of woman’s lot.”

Ah yes, the Mandelsloh! What a woman! At one point she enters a room carrying a bucket and pauses to talk high-mindedly with Fritz for a while. “Sophie reappeared … It seemed that she had been playing with some new kittens in the housemaids’ pantry. ‘So that is where they are,’ said the Mandelsloh. She was reminded now that she had brought the bucket of water to drown these kittens. The servants were fainthearted about their duty in this respect.” It is yet another sign of Fitzgerald’s mastery that this seemingly coldhearted Valkyrie turns out to be the most admirable character in the book—at once competent, selfless and commonsensical. Following Sophie’s three barbaric operations, she alone cares for her sister with complete devotion, even when she knows it is all in vain. Near the end, she brusquely tells the annoyingly optimistic Fritz about the facts of death: “If you stayed here, you would not be wanted as a nurse …You would be wanted as a liar.”

Throughout The Blue Flower there are occasional longer chapters, carefully lit scenes of heartbreak and comedy: Karoline Justen’s aching realization that Fritz has fallen in love with an insignificant little girl; a Christmas feast at the Hardenbergs; Sophie’s engagement party; her first surgery without anesthesia. One watches with particular delight as Erasmus, who described Sophie as plain and empty-headed, slowly falls in love with his brother’s intended, eventually finding himself compelled to spend more and more time in her company because of one of the strongest motives “known to humanity, the need to torment himself.”

There is no waste in this apparently meandering, almost leisurely short novel. When young Dr. Dietmahler arrives on that memorable washday, he finds himself attracted to Fritz’s younger sister Sidonie. Two hundred pages later, the rising young surgeon again encounters Fraulein von Hardenberg, who smiles and claims to recall his visit. The doctor politely hands Sidonie his professional card. “That would bring his name to her mind, no doubt of it. But the few moments during which she had not been able to remember it confirmed Dietmahler in what, after all, he already knew, that he was nothing. What means something to us, that we can name. Sink, he told his hopes, with a kind of satisfaction, sink like a corpse dropped into the river. I am rejected, not for being unwelcome, not even for being ridiculous, but for being nothing.”

It is quite astonishing how much Penelope Fitzgerald packs into a little more than 200 pages. It is even more astonishing to realize that she is, past 80, writing better than ever. Perhaps such masterpieces as this, serene with wry wisdom, can only be achieved in later life. So seek The Blue Flower, and when you find it, rejoice. After a while, you’ll want to go out and look for The Beginning of Spring, Innocence, and The Gate of Angels.