The Blue Flower
 Cover to first edition hardback | |
| Author | Penelope Fitzgerald |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Published | 1995 (Flamingo) |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
The Blue Flower is a novel by British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It is a fictional treatment of part of the life of Friedrich van Hardenberg, who (after the events in the novel) would become an early practitioner of German Romanticism, using the pseudonym Novalis.
The Blue Flower was Fitzgerald's breakthough work for American readers. It was the first book of Mariner Books, a new paperback imprint of Houghton Mifflin, and Mariner would go on to publish paperback editions of all her books.[1]
Background
Fitzgerald first came upon the notion of blue flowers having literary significance in "The Fox", a short story of D. H. Lawrence. She would first get interested in Novalis, in the early 1960s, after hearing a musical setting of his mystical poetry, Hymns to the Night. She would further get interested in Novalis in researching Burne-Jones and his language of flowers, as his father-in-law, George MacDonald was a Novalis enthusiast.[2]
A gentian — a typically blue flower — that had faded into colorlessness, is mentioned as pressed into one of the two books at the end of The Bookshop. In The Beginning of Spring, Selwyn rhapsodizes about the "blue stream flowing gently over our heads", an unattributed Novalis quotation.[3]
Reception
There is no better introduction than this novel to the intellectual exaltation of the Romantic era ....
Critical review
The novel has a chapter of its own in Peter Wolfe Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald[5] and Hermione Lee Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life.[6]
Awards
The Blue Flower was the 1997 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.
References
Further reading
- Lee, Hermione (2014). "The Blue Flower". Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. Alfred A. Knopf.
- Wolfe, Peter (2004). "Kind of Blue". Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald. University of South Carolina Press.
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