The Blue Flower

Penelope Fitzgerald

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780544359451
• eBook ISBN: 9780547524764
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER in Fiction. Booker Prize–winning novelist Fitzgerald's crowning literary work centers on the 18th-century German poet and philosopher Novalis and his love for the simple Sophie.

The Blue Flower is set in the age of Goethe among the small towns and great universities of 18th-century Germany. It tells the true story of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a passionate, impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the romantic poet Novalis. Fritz seeks his father's permission to wed his "heart's heart," his "spirit's guide"—a plain, simple child named Sophievon Kühn. It is an attachment that shocks his family and friends. Their brilliant young Fritz, betrothed to a twelve-year-old dullard? How can this be?

Their rationality of love, the transfiguration of the commonplace, the clarity of purpose that comes with knowing one's own fate— these are the themes of this beguiling novel, themes treated with a mix of wit, grace, and mischievous humor.

"An extraordinary imagining . . . an original masterpiece."—Financial Times

"An astonishing book...Fitzgerald's greatest triumph."—New York Times Book Review

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Preface: Penelope Fitzgerald
• Introduction
• Author’s Note
• Epigraph
• Washday
• The Study
• The Bernhard
• Bernhard’s Red Cap
• The History of Freiherr Heinrich Von Hardenberg
• Uncle Wilhelm
• The Freiherr and the French Revolution
• In Jena
• An Incident in Student Life
• A Question of Money
• A Disagreement
• The Sense of Immortality
• The Just Family
• Fritz at Tennstedt
• Justen
• The Jena Circle
• What is the Meaning?
• The Rockenthiens
• A Quarter of an Hour
• The Nature of Desire
• Snow
• Now Let Me Get To Know Her
• I Can’t Comprehend Her
• The Brothers
• Christmas at Weissenfels
• The Mandelsloh
• Erasmus Calls on Karoline Just
• From Sophie’s Diary, 1795
• A Second Reading
• Sophie’s Likeness
• I Could Not Paint Her
• The Way Leads Inwards
• At Jena
• The Garden-House
• Sophie is Cold Through and Through
• Dr Hofrat Ebhard
• What is Pain?
• Karoline at Grüningen
• The Quarrel
• How to Run a Salt Mine
• Sophie at Fourteen
• The Freifrau in the Garden
• The Engagement Party
• The Intended
• She Must Go To Jena
• Visitors
• How Professor Stark Managed
• To Schlöben
• At the Rose
• A Dream
• Autumn 1796
• Erasmus is of Service
• A Visit to Magister Kegel
• Algebra, Like Laudanum, Deadens Pain
• Magister Kegel’s Lesson
• Afterword
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH