Particularly the opening chapter when a guest arrives at the Hardenberg house in Kloster Gasse it is washday, the annual occasion for washing personal and household linen, and his arrival effects an introduction to the household. But although the deeper meaning may elude me, there are passages I love. I still do not really understand the meaning of the blue flower. It is the sort of novel that, when you are reading it you ‘get’ it but afterwards, when trying to describe it to someone else, you struggle to grasp it. Love is instant for Fritz and, despite a little bemusement on the part of Sophie, and astonishment by his siblings and friends, he proves himself constant. It is 1794 and Fritz, an idealistic and passionate student of philosophy and writer of poems, stays with some family friends and meets their youngest daughter, Sophie von Kühn.

Fitzgerald recreates this particular time in German history with a delicacy that, despite the language and sometimes confusing names, makes the people become real. The chapters are concise and this encouraged me to ‘just read another’ and so, gradually, almost without realizing, I fell into the story. ‘The Blue Flower’ is a short novel, 223 pages. He is a young man so self-contained, so absorbed in his thoughts, that I wondered where the drama would arise. Set in 18th century Germany, Fitzgerald tells her imagining of the teenage story of real German poet and philosopher Fritz von Hardenberg, later called Novalis. For someone about to read it, it can seem a trifle intimidating. When I bought it, I didn’t realize it was the last novel by the Booker prize winner published five years before her death in 2000 aged 83. If ever there is a book to persevere with, to have patience with, and to go back and re-read again, it is ‘The Blue Flower’ by Penelope Fitzgerald.

The blue flower fitzgerald