[In the following review, Knapp delineates the positive and negative features of Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.]

Penelope Fitzgerald’s ninth novel The Blue Flower, sets out to retell the tale of Friedrich von Hardenberg and Sophie von Kuhn, one of literary history’s most poignant love stories. The effort is timely, since the book was published on the two-hundredth anniversary of the couple’s first meeting.

Hardenberg, who assumed the pen name “Novalis” after Sophie’s death, was a member of an aristocratic family in Saxony. He studied philosophy with Fichte in Jena and left behind, in his brief creative years before an untimely death at age twenty-nine, a work that defines the philosophical and literary heights of German romanticism. In his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen he created the symbolic “blue flower,” the essence of romantic longing that goes beyond all limits of time and space: “I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the Blue Flower. It lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think about nothing else.”

Fitzgerald’s depiction of Hardenberg is historically accurate. His love for Sophie, who is all of twelve years old when they meet, is instantaneous and unshakable. He gradually persuades her, then the various family members involved, to accept their engagement. This feat soon appears small, however, in contrast to the battle for Sophie’s health. She has a tumor infected by tuberculosis, and even Hardenberg’s devotion cannot save her waning strength. Sophie von Kuhn died in 1979, barely fifteen years old; Hardenberg would survive her only by four years, as the entire young generation of his family also fell to tuberculosis in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Given the richness of the material, Fitzgerald’s presentation is often understated. Most frustrating is the depiction of Sophie as dull and unimaginative; she can barely read and write and never does learn to spell Hardenberg’s name. This character fails to come alive and is less interesting than even the least of the secondary characters. Of these there are many, and taken as a whole they give an interesting glimpse into the life of late-eighteenth-century Saxony, including the struggles between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, the influence of philosophers such as Fichte and the Schlegels, and the horrifying status quo of medical treatment before anesthetics. One of the book’s most notable features is its use of language to mirror the expressions and syntactical nuances of the German—in places it reads like a very loyal translation that lets the original shine through. (Readers without some previous background may find it rough going, however.)

Fitzgerald’s achievement is to have gently rekindled the theme of the romantic search for the blue flower for modern readers. Perhaps Sophie’s vacuous nature should highlight the fact that the romantic yearning itself, not its object, becomes the true source of life and creativity, for “the external world is the world of shadows. The universe, after all, is within us. The way leads inwards, always inwards.”