Award-winning illustrator James Albon, working with reductive lino cuts, provides images that reflect the shifting nature of Fritz himself: energetic and melancholy, light and dark. The Blue Flower: A Novel Kindle Edition by Penelope Fitzgerald (Author), Candia McWilliam (Introduction) Format: Kindle Edition 667 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle 12.49 Read with Our Free App Audiobook 0.00 Free with your Audible trial A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER in Fiction. Reading The Blue Flower is an ethereal and addictive experience, sure to be just the beginning of a literary journey with an underrated yet exceptional writer. In his introduction to this edition, Neel Mukherjee describes Fitzgerald’s books as ‘slim, fleet-footed, at once weightless, like air, and immense with the worlds they contain’. Set in Germany at the very end of the eighteenth century, The Blue Flower is the story of the brilliant Fritz von Hardenberg, a graduate of the Universities of Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg, learned in Dialectics and Mathematics, who later became the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis.

Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel is a modern masterpiece, a feat of immersion and sleight of hand it is effortlessly light, reducing the great distance of history to little more than the turn of a page, whilst containing unexpected depths of poetry at its heart. His family, alternately bemused and charmed, do their best to both hinder and aid this ultimately tragic betrothal. Brilliant and idealistic, his heart is captured by the young Sophie von Kuhn, an artless child he nonetheless describes as his ‘true Philosophy’.

The story is about a part of the life of the poet Novalis (1772-1801), real name Friedrich von Hardenberg, a Jena Romanticist. The Blue Flower tells of the early life of Fritz von Hardenberg, the young man who would become the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis. 5/5: Penelope Fitzgerald is one of the greatest post-war English writers, with two remarkable talents: both shine very clear in this beautiful book.

The blue flower fitzgerald