Tom's Two Cents: The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

Who is Penelope Fitzgerald?  You don't know?  Well I didn't either until sometime last year, when I became acquainted with her biographer, Hermione Lee, who is president of Wolfson College, Oxford, England, and a distinguished writer and teacher herself.  Born in 1916 in England, Fitzgerald spent most of her life as a wife, mother and teacher.  She began writing in her sixties and published nine novels, three biographies, and numerous essays and reviews.  Fairly late in her short career, she moved from the traditional to the historical novel, writing four such, one set in Florence, Italy, one in Russia, one in Cambridge, England, and the final one, "The Blue Flower," set in Saxony, Germany, in the late 18th century. 

"The Blue Flower" is the story of a short period in the youth of the young German poet-philosopher, Fritz Von Hardenburg, later known as the poet Novalis, and his courtship of a young girl, Sophie, whom he falls madly in love with, when he meets her (she is only 12) in her mother and stepfather's home.  We follow only a few years in his life as he attends multiple colleges, starts to train for a position as director of salt mines, and waits for his bride-to-be to grow up to a "marrying age" of fourteen or fifteen!  (I am reminded of my great grandmother, Eliza Minerva Webb Killingsworth,  married at fourteen and a widow with five children at twenty-one, who it was said, cried that she was an "old woman"!  Remember Scarlett O'Hara's famous consignment to widowhood at the ripe old age of 16?).  Lest you immediately draw the conclusion that this is a "they lived happily ever after" kind of story, it, like my great grandmother’s, is not.

Fitzgerald has her hand metaphorically on the pulse of life, and in this work at least she seems drawn to both its tragedy and comedy.  Family life especially appeals to her, and her insights into those dynamics are both delightful and heartrending.  Witness the opening chapter of the book, entitled "Washday," (each of the short fifty-five chapters has its own title, as in most novels of the 18th-19th centuries), in which a visitor to the Hardenburgs arrives unannounced to witness a panorama of bedding and underclothes floating from upper story windows into the waiting baskets of the servants below!  Sophie herself is a semi-charming, adolescent nitwit, whom no one can quite understand why Fritz has fallen in love with.  Sound familiar?  Well, there surely is a ring of contemporary truth in this old-fashioned story, and Fitzgerald has surely found it.

Fitzgerald also practices what Robert Frost would call "the art of omission," so one must be ever prepared to read between the lines.  This is a short book, as were all her novels, less than 250 pages.  Written in her eighties, "The Blue Flower" was also her last work and her only big American success, thanks to her American publisher, Houghton Mifflin.  Hermione Lee, her superb biographer, describes her as giving "a misleading impression in public of a mild, absent-minded old lady... [but] she wrote in a quiet voice, slipping unpredictably between comedy and darkness."