SOURCE: “Love in the Time of Tuberculosis,” in Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 1, October, 1997, p. 6.

In the following review, Herzog asserts that the spareness of Fitzgerald’s style and her ability to capture setting in The Blue Flower create a powerful effect on the reader.

The late eighteenth century is fascinating not least because it was the era of the American and French Revolutions as well as the birth of modern notions of democracy. It was also the age when the modern ideas about heterosexual romance that still move, suffocate, inspire and torment women and men to this day were first fully elaborated and worked out. As Penelope Fitzgerald’s absorbing novel The Blue Flower makes clear, there were then—as now—winners in the game of hetero-love, people whose lives seemed effortlessly to fit the cultural ideal. There were also casualties.

Based on the early...