The Blue Flower Penelope Fitzgerald

The writer

Penelope Fitzgerald, neé Knox,  was born in Lincoln, England in 1916, the daughter of Edmund Knox, later editor of the satirical magazine Punch, and Christina Hicks, one of the first women to study at Oxford, and she grew up in Hampstead, London.

Fitzgerald was educated at Wycombe Abbey and Somerville College at the University of Oxford where she graduated in 1938 with a Congratulatory First class degree (described by the New York Times as "a highly unusual honour in which the examining professors ask no questions about the candidate's written work but simply stand and applaud.")

Fitzgerald worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation during the 2^nd World War, and in 1942 she married the lawyer Desmond Fitzgerald, whom she had met at Oxford. He served with the Irish Guards in Libya and won the military cross for bravery, but he returned to civilian life an alcoholic.

In the early 1950s the Fitxgeralds co-edited a magazine called World Review, which published J.D.Salinger, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer and Alberto Moravia. However soon afterwards, Desmond was disbarred for "forging signatures on cheques that he cashed at the pub."

The end of his legal career led to a life of poverty for the Fitzgeralds; at times they were almost destitute and lived for months in a homeless shelter. They later lived for years in council housing (ie, public housing) and at times on a houseboat (which sank twice). During the 1960s, Fitzgerald taught at a drama school and at a private school. The couple had three children: two daughters, Tina and Maria, and a son, Valpy.

n 1975, at the age of 58, a year before Desmond´s death, Fitgerald began to publish biographies and over the next five years she published four novels, winning the Booker Prize for fiction in 1975 for the novel Offshore. (A film adaptation of her novel The Bookshop has been written and directed by Isabel Coixet.) In 1999 Fitzgerald was awarded Pen Award for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature".

The Blue Flower

The novel is based on the life of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801) before he became famous as the poet, philosopher and mystic, Novalis. It covers the years from 1790 to 1797 when von Hardenberg was a student of history, philosophy and law at the universities of Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg. To the astonishment of everyone who knows him, at the age of 22 the intellectual and noble von Hardenberg becomes inexplicably and mystically drawn to the 12-year-old Sophie, a rather ordinary little girl. The couple become engaged a year later but never marry.

However this summary hardly does justice to the experience of The Blue Flower, which is more like being transported in time than reading a novel. Like all Fitzgerald´s books, The Blue Flower is short but packs the emotional punch or a far longer book and builds a world in concise, dense, subtle, exquisite prose that nevertheless never draws attention to itself. The writer Neel Mukherjee describes Fitzgerald’s books as ‘slim, fleet-footed, at once weightless, like air, and immense with the worlds they contain’.

The novel has been critically acclaimed and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997.



Questions to think about while reading



1. The blue flower of the novel's title is the subject of the first chapter of a story that von Hardenberg is writing. In it, a young man longs to see the blue flower that "lies incessantly at his heart, so that he can imagine and think about nothing else". What is the meaning of this blue flower?

2. The novel is based on real events and real people but is fictionalised. Does this make any difference to our reading of the novel?

3. How does Fitzgerald, from the opening line, take us so vividly into a world we do not know and make us feel at home there?