When I recently read Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Fritz to his family, Novalis to the literary world) was released from the undergraduate memory cellar to which I had reluctantly consigned him many years ago. A quick bit of scurrying about on the internet made me aware of this 1995 publication by Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000). An equally quick bit of maths will establish that she was 78 when it came out (it was her last novel).

Hewing closely to the sources, as far as I can tell, it recounts the strange passion that Fritz (1772-1801) developed, at lightning speed, for Sophie von Kuehn (1782-97). Woven in and out of this love story is Fritz's quest for the mysterious "blue flower".


Available to borrow from the Internet Archive

The book is a delight. Light as a feather, and yet full of period detail from the Germany of the late 18th century; laugh-out-loud funny in places, while retaining the capacity to move us; presenting an amiable and easy-going cast of characters that leap off the page, and yet brimming with philosophical and psychological references; and as much at home with a down-to-earth account of pickling and laundering and child-rearing as with a resonantly haunting story of the unattainable and incomprehensible -- the novel succeeds on all these levels. It's quite a feat to do and be all that.

In the course of the pages, we meet many of the personages from Wulf's book: Fichte, Schiller, Goethe, the Schlegel tribe... But they don't take over. The focus is on Fritz, Sophie, and their family members, many of whom are memorable characters.

Fritz is a very likeable young man. Yet the way in which he loses his heart to Sophie is pretty hard to understand. She's terribly young, for a start (just 12 when he meets her, and 14 when they officially become engaged). This isn't nearly as icky as it sounds. As this reviewer puts it: "Fitzgerald’s strength is that this is no Lolita. There is nothing unpleasant on the page. [Fritz] does not sexualise her -- rather, he idealises her, and is more than happy to wait the four years until she can marry him."

To us, she comes across not as some precocious purveyor of wisdom, but -- frankly -- as a bit of an airhead. Her preoccupations are childish; her diary entries prosaic. One of Fritz's brothers, Erasmus, warns him: "Fritz, Sophie is stupid... She is not beautiful, she is not even pretty." The brothers come to blows. But then Erasmus comes round... Sophie charms him, and later their father too.

During this time, Fritz is boarding with Coelestin Just of Tennstedt (where he is learning administration and office management). His boss's niece, Karoline, is a smart young woman, and obviously in love with Fritz herself (he is oblivious to this). She looks on perplexed. As do we...

Fitzgerald is great at juxtaposition. Here we have a letter, followed by a comment:

"'Dear Hardenberg, In the first place I thank you for your letter secondly for your hair and thirdly for the sweet Needle-case which has given me so much pleasure. You ask me whether you may be allowed to write to me? You can be assured that it is pleasant to me at All Times to read a letter from you. You know dear Hardenberg I must write no more. Sophie von Kuehn.'
"'She is my wisdom,' said Fritz."

What is he thinking? We have no idea...

Later we have this:

"'Hardenberg, why have you not written to me?' Sophie asked. 'Dear, dear Soephgen, I wrote to you every day this week. On Monday I wrote to explain to you that although God created the world it has no real existence until we apprehend it.'"

Fritz himself admits that he doesn't understand Sophie: "I do not want to change her, but I admit that I should like to feel that I could do so if necessary... I should be happier if I could see one opening, the shadow of an opening, where I could make myself felt a little." But failure to locate such a gap doesn't stop his infatuation.

The painter whom Fritz hires to produce Sophie's likeness also fails utterly to do so: "The truth is that I have been defeated by Fraeulein von Kuehn...," he says. "In every created thing... there is a question being asked... I could not hear her question, and so I could not paint."

But the affair of the painting gives Fitzgerald other opportunities to gently mock the cleft between the artistic and the mundane. At one point, our artist says: "'I should like to paint your two daughters near a fountain -- sitting on stone steps -- broken, time-worn stone. In the distance, a glimpse of the sea.' 'We are some way from the sea,' said [Sophie's stepfather] Rockenthien doubtfully. '... Strategically, that will always be one of our problems.' 'Strategy does not interest me,' said the young painter. '... Apart from that, what does the sea suggest to you?' But to no-one present did it suggest anything, except salt water."


Fritz's ring, inscribed 'Sophie be my Guardian Spirit', is displayed in the Municipal Museum at Weissenfels, the town where he worked and died. The image of Sophie comes from a previously produced miniature

Fritz himself is a fascinating character. He's a lovable chatterer, bubbling with ideas and mind-pictures. But he admits: "I have, I can't deny it, a certain inexpressible sense of immortality." At one point, he has a dream-like experience in the graveyard: "A young man, still almost a boy, was standing in the half darkness, with his head bent, himself as white, still, and speechless as a memorial. The sight was consoling to Fritz, who knew that the young man, although living, was not human, but also that at that moment there was no boundary between them. He said aloud, 'The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the kingdom of light. How different they will appear when this darkness is gone and the shadow-body has passed away. The universe, after all, is within us. The way leads inwards, always inwards.'"

Plenty more of Fritz's philosophy and worldview emerges, very gently and unobtrusively, in the course of the story. His belief in the unity of human knowledge, for example; and in the universal self -- "Fichte explained to us that there is only one absolute self, one identity for all humanity."

Above all, the motif of the blue flower recurs frequently. He presents it first as an unfinished story (it later becomes part of the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which itself remained unfinished). It's a snippet, a snapshot, another isolated, dream-like sequence. Fritz describes a young man remembering the stories of a stranger. The young man is not drawn by the man's account of the treasure; what he longs to see is the blue flower: "It lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think about nothing else." The young man doesn't know where this stranger came from. And he doesn't know why he himself was the only one who "was truly caught and held by what he told us".


Blue flowers, I realize, looking through my photos, are rare... The one at the top is a cornflower from England. The rest, admittedly more purple than blue, are from Mongolia

The blue flower will mean something different to everyone who hears about it. Karoline, for example, is perplexed, and tries to use reason to figure out what the flower CAN'T be. Sophie, invited by Fritz to tell him what she thinks it means, asks whether he doesn't know himself. He says he sometimes thinks he does... But Sophie stays prosaic. She wonders why the man in the story should care about a flower, and she asks what the flower is called: "'He knew once,' said Fritz. 'He was told the name, but he has forgotten it. He would give his life to remember it.'... He said, 'If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching.'"

Doctor Hofrat Ebhard knows how to diagnose consumption, since one in four of his patients dies of it: "He had never had the chance to hear the opening of The Blue Flower, but if he had done so he could have said immediately what he thought it meant." And then there's Bernhard, Fritz's rather fey younger brother: "He had been struck ... by one thing in particular: the stranger who had spoken at the dinner table about the Blue Flower had been understood by one person and one only. This person must have been singled out as distinct from all the rest of his family. It was a matter of recognising your own fate and greeting it as familiar when it came."

The blue flower later becomes, for the whole Romantic movement, a symbol of something that is infinitely to be desired, but never quite attainable.

And according to Fitzgerald biographer Hermione Lee: "Fitzgerald said once that the blue flower is what you want of life. 'Even if there's no possibility of reaching it, you must never give up'."

All of which turns out to be a description of Sophie, too. She contracts tuberculosis, and in spite -- or because -- of a series of horrific operations (performed with wine and laudanum as the only anaesthetic), she dies, shortly after her fifteenth birthday. She continued to influence Novalis's writing, however, until he too died, at the age of 28. It was not a fortunate family. Nine of his ten siblings died in infancy or in their early years.



As I said, Fitzgerald has an impressive ability to evoke the ethos and times of her characters. Parsimony is important, for example. When old sheets are required for one of Sophie's horrific operations, this is problematic: "Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as worn-out sheets in Saxony, but some were thirty or forty years older than others."

And there's lots more: Laundry once a year; a little opium at bedtime; linseed poultices; the pleasures of the table (cows' udder and nutmeg soup, anyone?); and the medical conventions of the day ("It is dangerous -- on this, at least, all Germany's physicians were agreed -- not to keep the stomach full at all times").

Altogether, very, very memorable.

Penelope Fitzgerald has been a great discovery. I will certainly read more.