The Blue Flower (4th Estate Matchbook Classics)

(Paperback)

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Penelope Fitzgeralds final masterpiece.
Set in Germany at the very end of the eighteenth century, The Blue Flower is the story of the brilliant Fritz von Hardenberg, a graduate of the Universities of Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg, learned in Dialectics and Mathematics, who later became the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis. The passionate and idealistic Fritz needs his fathers permission to announce his engagement to his hearts heart, his true Philosophy, twelve-year-old Sophie von Kuhn. It is a betrothal which amuses, astounds and disturbs his family and friends. How can it be so

One of the most admired of all Penelope Fitzgeralds books, The Blue Flower was chosen as Book of the Year more than any other in 1995. Her final book, it confirmed her reputation as one of the finest novelists of the century.

Reviews

The Blue Flower is a model of what historical fiction can be at its best when the radical otherness of other times is not merely acknowledged but made integral to the fictional experience. It's also Fitzgerald at her best elegant, inventive, hilarious, unsparing. I adore this book. Jonathan Franzen

Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window. Sebastian Faulks

Wise and ironic, funny and humane, Fitzgerald is a wonderful, wonderful writer. David Nicholls

An enchanting novel about heart, body and mind. The writing is ellipitical and witty so that what could be a sad little love story is constantly funny and always absorbing. This novel is a jewel. Carmen Callil, Daily Telegraph

Her sense of time and place is marvellously deft, done in a few words. She knows how they all walked, eased their old joints. She knows the damp smell of decay of the ancient schlosses. In a bare little book she reveals a country and an age as lost as Tolstoys Russia and which we seem somehow always to have known. Jane Gardam, Spectator

Detail, expertly dabbed in, provides a substantial background for the story of a poet which, it is subtly suggested, is also the story of a remarkable moment in the history of civilisation It is hard to see how the hopes and defeats of Romanticism, or the relation between inspiration and common life, between genius and mere worthiness, could be more deftly rendered than they are in this remarkable novel. Frank Kermode, LRB

Author Bio

Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. Three of her novels, The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She won the Prize in 1979 for Offshore. Her last novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the 'Book of the Year'. It won America's National Book Critics' Circle Award. She died in April 2000, at the age of eighty-three.