[In the following review, Ratcliffe complains that while Fitzgerald has provided a well-drawn setting and several memorable characters, she has not given all of her heart to The Blue Flower.]

Penelope Fitzgerald has long mastered the high comedy of optimistic free spirits being forced to fight the unscrupulous to prove they are really free. In her earlier novels, battle was joined on native institutional soil—the British Museum, the BBC, a children’s acting school. More recently, the campaign switched to Tuscany and Russia and, most rewarding of all, to the early twentieth century which continues to inform our lives: Moscow (The Beginning of Spring, 1988) and Cambridge (The Gate of Angels, 1991) on the eve of the First World War. These are probably her best books: they are positive and inspiring.

The Blue Flower—no less ambitious but rather more detached—takes place 200 years ago at another moment when the world was picking up speed. In the so-called Golden Hollow of Saxony and Thuringia, as the French Revolution and Napoleon thunder distantly, poets sniff the air of the woods and fields for the enriching presence of coal, copper, silver or lignite. Heartland of the German classical and Romantic movements—Goethe, Herder and Jean-Paul are in Weimar; Schiller, Fichte, Novalis and the Schlegel brothers in Jena—the Saxon principalities are honeycombed with mineral wealth, and Fitzgerald’s hero Fritz is training to be an Assistant Inspector of Salt Mines.

Eldest of seven children, with a patrician father who runs the house on a Moravian regime of prayer, and a mother who rarely goes out of doors, Fritz is Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), alias the mystic mining engineer and visionary poet Novalis, pupil of Schiller, contemporary of Wordsworth and Blake. Fitzgerald tells us that the name ‘Novalis’, which he chose for himself, means ‘newly cleared land’; and indeed her gentle Fritz is dismayed to find himself trapped in conventional perceptions of the world even as he stakes out his own new transcendental patch:

I say this is animate, but that is inanimate. I am a Salt Inspector, that is rock salt. I go further than this, much further, and say this is waking, that is a dream, this belongs to the body, that to the spirit, this belongs to space and distance, that to time and duration. But … I want to exert myself to find a different kind of measurement.

‘For him,’ adds a colleague in Jena, ‘there is no real barrier between the seen and unseen’. He can, therefore, fall inappropriately but forever in love with the 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn, and persist until he receives permission to marry her when she is 16. Long before then, however, Sophie has been winged by the dark angel of Romanticism, and is dying of TB.

The Blue Flower, fewer than 200 pages long, comprises 55 chapters, whose brevity sometimes unsettles the rhythm of the tale. Period and household are wonderfully well set up with a Brueghelesque laundry scene, and pretty soon we know how contemporaries could tell the Hardenbergs were skint, that members of the upper classes were not supposed to run in public (send a servant), and that in eighteenth-century Saxony you could take a glass of schnapps at the grocer’s but not at an inn. The magical onset of snow, the ceremonies of Christmas Eve, the mundane beauty of dawn after a morning duel: the novel is full of such sensuous occasions, precisely felt and seen.

There is an excess of characters, and the most memorable are not the lovers but those who mind and watch and stand on the side: among them a bookseller, a precocious child, Sophie’s fearless sister Mandelsloh, wiser than any man at 22, and Fritz’s mother, behind whose timidity lie strong feelings and a suppressed urge to speak out. The result is a meticulous, clever and often witty fiction of German cultural history, to which the novelist gives all her curiosity and intelligence but not, quite, all her heart.