The Blue Flower

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The Blue Flower Pub. Date: 4/28/1997 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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The Blue Flower Pub. Date: 8/28/2003 Publisher: Flamingo
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Blue Flower (Large Print) Pub. Date: 11/1/1998 Publisher: Cengage Gale
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The Blue Flower (Cassette - Unabridged, 4 Cassettes) Pub. Date: 11/28/2000 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Blue Flower (Cassette - Unabridged, 5 Cassettes) Pub. Date: 1/28/1980 Publisher: ISIS Audio Books

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Overview

In eighteenth-century Germany, the impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the Romantic poet Novalis seeks his father's permission to wed his true philosophy—a plain, simple child named Sophie. The attachment shocks his family and friends. This brilliant young man, betrothed to a twelve-year-old dullard! How can it be? A literary sensation and a bestseller in England and the United States, The Blue Flower was one of eleven books- and the only paperback- chosen as an Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review. The 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner in Fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

In the introduction to his translation of Novalis's Henry von Ofterdingen, Palmer Hilty described Sophie von Khn as "a callow, undistinguished girl of Thuringia." Not a terribly inspiring subject, unless the writer is Fitzgerald, the author of the 1979 Booker Prize winner Offshore and a shortlist perennial for the prize. Fitzgerald presents a brilliant, subtly ironic portrayal of Friedrich von Hardenberg (aka Novalis) as an anti-Pygmalion who takes an unformed, all-too-human girl and fires her into an image of chaste muse. After a strict Saxon upbringing and an education at Jena that revolved around Fichte's idealism, Hardenberg meets the 12-year-old Sophie and falls immediately in love. Sophie is neither particularly pretty nor smart (her diary entries run to "We began pickling the raspberries" or "Today no-one came and nothing happened"), but she is optimistic, innocent, malleable. Their three-year courtship parallels her losing battle with tuberculosis; when she dies at 15, she is petrified as the vulnerable, ethereal and pure muse. There's scads of research here, into daily life in Enlightenment-era Saxony, German reactions to the French Revolution and Napoleon, early 19th-century German philosophy (by page two, a fellow Fichte devotee announces, "there is no such concept as a thing in itself!"). But history aside, this is a smart novel. Fitzgerald is alternately witty and poignant, especially in her portrayal of the intelligent, capable women who are too often taken for granted by the oblivious poets. Fitzgerald has created an alternately biting and touching exploration of the nature of Romanticismcapital "R" and small. (Apr.)

More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews

From The Critics

Fitzgerald never repeats herself, and her latest novel, named Book of the Year by 19 British newspapers in 1995, is her most original book yet. Here she reconstructs the life of 18th-century German romantic poet Novalis, focusing on his boisterous family, his struggle to articulate his longings, and, most tellingly, his passion for 12-year-old Sophie, a simple child he intends to marry despite the furious reservations of family and friends. Fitzgerald doesn't make it entirely clear what draws Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis's real name) to little Sophie-but that is precisely the point. Throughout, he is carried aloft by an inchoate desire for something beyond that is summed up in his little story of the blue flower: "I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower....I can imagine and think about nothing else." As a counterpoint to her protagonist's beautifully captured romanticism, Fitzgerald successfully evokes the sights, sound, and smells-and the constant sorrows-of domestic life in 18th-century Germany. A little treasure; highly recommended.-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780395859971
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date: 4/28/1997
Pages: 240
Sales rank: 199,181
Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.25 (h) x 0.56 (d)

Meet the Author

Penelope Fitzgerald

"I've heard my novels described as 'light,' but I mean them very seriously," Penelope Fitzgerald has written. And while it's true that the tone and humor in her novels may belie the insight they carry, the award-winning Fitzgerald has always been a writer that people do indeed take seriously.

Biography

Although some of her novels were published previously in the U. S., Penelope Fitzgerald remained little known to a general American audience until 1997, when Houghton Mifflin's trade paperback imprint, Mariner, published The Blue Flower, which was chosen as an Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review, and won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award.

The then 81-year-old Fitzgerald was selected as winner of the NBCC Award over fellow nominees Don DeLillo, Philip Roth and Charles Frazier, winning her first American literary award. In her native England, Fitzgerald had long been a favorite of critics and writers. Her novel Offshore won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, and three of her novels -- The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, and The Beginning of Spring -- were finalists for the Prize.

Fitzgerald began her writing career late in life. She was sixty years old in 1977 when her first novel, The Golden Child, was published, a book she wrote to entertain her husband, who was dying of cancer. Much of her previous sixty years' experience informs her writing, from her days as a lowly assistant at the BBC (Human Voices), to a stint living on a houseboat in the Thames (Offshore), to working at a bookstore in a seaside village (The Bookshop).

Fitzgerald was born into a distinguished intellectual and professional family, the daughter of E. V. Knox, who was editor of Punch, and the granddaughter on both sides of Anglican bishops (her father and three uncles are the subjects of her biography, The Knox Brothers). She won a scholarship to Oxford and graduated shortly before the Second World War.

With her husband, Desmond, she ran a small literary journal called the World Review, which reprinted pieces by such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Dylan Thomas.

Author biography courtesy of Houghton Mifflin.

Good To Know

Dinitia Smith, in her New York Times obituary of May 3, 2000, quoted Penelope Fitzgerald from 1998 as saying, "I have remained true to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?"

While studying on scholarship at Oxford, one of Fitzgerald's fellow students was J.R.R. Tolkien.

1. Date of Birth:
  
  December 17, 1916
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Lincoln, England
1. Date of Death:
  
  May 3, 2000
2. Place of Death:
  
  London, England
1. Education:
  
  Somerville College, Oxford University, 1939

1	Washday	1
2	The Study	5
3	The Bernhard	8
4	Bernhard's Red Cap	11
5	The History of Freiherr Heinrich von Hardenberg	16
6	Uncle Wilhelm	20
7	The Freiherr and the French Revolution	24
8	In Jena	28
9	An Incident in Student Life	32
10	A Question of Money	36
11	A Disagreement	39
12	The Sense of Immortality	43
13	The Just Family	47
14	Fritz at Tennstedt	51
15	Justen	55
16	The Jena Circle	58
17	What is the Meaning?	60
18	The Rockenthiens	64
19	A Quarter of an Hour	69
20	The Nature of Desire	73
21	Snow	76
22	Now Let Me Get to Know Her	79
23	I Can't Comprehend Her	86
24	The Brothers	89
25	Christmas at Weissenfels	92
26	The Mandelsloh	98
27	Erasmus Calls on Karoline Just	103
28	From Sophie's Diary, 1795	107
29	A Second Reading	109
30	Sophie's Likeness	115
31	I Could Not Paint Her	119
32	The Way Leads Inwards	125
33	At Jena	129
34	The Garden-House	132
35	Sophie is Cold Through and Through	135
36	Dr Hofrat Ebhard	137
37	What is Pain?	139
38	Karoline at Gruningen	142
39	The Quarrel	146
40	How to Run a Salt Mine	148
41	Sophie at Fourteen	154
42	The Freifrau in the Garden	159
43	The Engagement Party	166
44	The Intended	173
45	She Must Go to Jena	181
46	Visitors	183
47	How Professor Stark Managed	190
48	To Schloben	195
49	At the Rose	200
50	A Dream	205
51	Autumn 1796	208
52	Erasmus is of Service	211
53	A Visit to Magister Kegel	213
54	Algebra, Like Laudanum, Deadens Pain	216
55	Magister Kegel's Lesson	218
	Afterword	225

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Anonymous

Posted December 26, 2005

So Beautiful

This is possibly my favorite book of all time. I fell in love with the words, the pictures it allowed my mind to imagine, the characters, their joys and misfortunes. It is simply beautiful, so romantic and inspiring. Whenever I glimpse at it, it reminds me that no matter what happens, life is nothing without love.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted August 14, 2001

Unique insight into the making of a romantic poet

Discover the poet Novalis and the historical setting of the 1700's in Fitzgerald's THE BLUE FLOWER. Her writing, as always, is truly unique and fascinating.
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The Blue Flower

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Overview

All Available Formats + Editions

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

From The Critics

Product Details

Meet the Author

Penelope Fitzgerald

Biography

Good To Know

Table of Contents

Rating Distribution

So Beautiful

Unique insight into the making of a romantic poet