SOURCE: A review of The Blue Flower, in World Literature Today, Vol. 72, No. 2, Spring, 1998, p. 371.

In the following review, Knapp delineates the positive and negative features of Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.

Penelope Fitzgerald’s ninth novel The Blue Flower, sets out to retell the tale of Friedrich von Hardenberg and Sophie von Kuhn, one of literary history’s most poignant love stories. The effort is timely, since the book was published on the two-hundredth anniversary of the couple’s first meeting.

Hardenberg, who assumed the pen name “Novalis” after Sophie’s death, was a member of an aristocratic family in Saxony. He studied philosophy with Fichte in Jena and left behind, in his brief creative years before an untimely death at age twenty-nine, a work that defines the philosophical and literary heights of German romanticism. In his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen he created the symbolic “blue flower...