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The Blue Flower, in detail
The Blue Flower is a novel about the German Romantic poet Novalis — born Friedrich von Hardenberg — and specifically about his inexplicable, passionate attachment to a twelve-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn, whom he met when he was twenty-two and who died of tuberculosis at fifteen before he could marry her. Fitzgerald dramatizes the attachment without explaining it and without either endorsing or condemning it. The novel holds the reader in a position of suspended judgment that is one of its most distinctive achievements.
The novel is very short and structured in a series of brief, almost cinematic scenes that jump forward and backward in time. Fitzgerald's period detail is remarkable — the late eighteenth-century German Romantic milieu, the von Hardenberg household with its many siblings and its Pietist father, the cramped winter interiors and the muddy roads — but the detail is never explanatory. Fitzgerald trusts the reader to inhabit the period without narrating it. What she does narrate, precisely, is the movement of minds: what it felt like to believe, as the Romantics did, that the world had a hidden spiritual unity that art could reveal, and what it meant when reality failed to cooperate.
The blue flower of the title is from a dream Novalis describes: a boy searching for an endless blue flower that is both object and symbol of the Romantic longing — the thing desired that recedes as you approach it. Sophie, as Novalis conceives her, is his blue flower. Fitzgerald is unsentimental about this. She shows Sophie as a real, limited, cheerful girl, not as a mystical avatar, and the gap between who Sophie actually is and who Novalis requires her to be is where the novel lives.
The Blue Flower is a short book that repays very slow reading. Fitzgerald won the National Book Critics Circle Award for it in 1997, and it is routinely cited as among the best British novels of the 1990s. Readers who want action or resolution may find it slight. Readers who admire economy, precision, and the rendering of ideas through lived scene will find it close to perfect.
The big ideas
- 1.
Fitzgerald refuses to explain or moralize the Novalis-Sophie relationship. She holds it in suspension, which is harder and more honest than either condemnation or romanticism.
- 2.
The blue flower is the central image of German Romanticism: a symbol of beauty, longing, and the endlessly receding ideal. Fitzgerald uses it without ever reducing it to a single meaning.
- 3.
The brief, discontinuous scene structure is a formal choice about historical consciousness — we see the past in flashes, as it survives in records, not as a continuous present.
