The Blue Flower #1: The golden age
Footnotes & Tangents for chapters 1–8 of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
‘Fate has put into my hands a young man, from whom everything may be expected, and he explained himself to me at once with fire – with indescribably much fire. He is thin and well-made, with a beautiful expression when he gets carried away. He talks three times as much, and as fast, as the rest of us. On the very first evening he told me that the golden age would return, and that there was nothing evil in the world. I don’t know if he is still of the same opinion. His name is von Hardenberg.’
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Hello and welcome to this slow read of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. My name is Simon Haisell and I am the host of Footnotes & Tangents, book guides and slow reads of novels worth savouring. Check out our read-along plans for 2026.
In Week 1 of this slow read, we are reading chapters 1–8. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading these chapters before returning to this post to join the discussion.
Who was Penelope Fitzgerald?
“Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention.” — AS Byatt
Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) was sixty when she published her first novel.1 Her second book, The Bookshop (1978), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and her third, Offshore (1979), won. Kazuo Ishiguro once said he was haunted by the fact that most great novels were written by authors under the age of 40.2 Martin Amis believed old writers were “past their prime.” But as Hilary Mantel observed:
Women writers often start later, and possibly have a different shape to their careers; I’m thinking of Penelope Fitzgerald, who just got better and better.3
The shape of her life encompassed raising three children, teaching to make ends meet, and small failures and ill-fate that sidelined early literary ambitions. The year she graduated from Oxford, she told the university newspaper: “I have been reading steadily for seventeen years; when I go down I want to start writing.”
And she did, in various forms: writing radio scripts for the BBC during wartime, co-editing a literary magazine with her husband, and later writing two biographies, one on the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, the other about her father and his extraordinary brothers.4
Her first novel (The Golden Child) was a museum mystery written for her dying husband, Desmond. Her next four books were based on her own life: working in a provincial bookshop (The Bookshop), living on a houseboat in Battersea (Offshore), working at the BBC (Human Voices), and teaching at a stage school (At Freddie’s).
Her final four books are historical, moving beyond her own experience. They take the reader to post-war Italy in Innocence, Russia on the eve of revolution in The Beginning of Spring, and pre-war Cambridge in The Gate of Angels. Her last novel, The Blue Flower, is the only one to focus on a real historical figure, the German romantic Friedrich von Hardenberg.
These four books are essential reading for anyone interested in how fiction animates the past and can convey whole life-worlds with lightness and concise precision. Fitzgerald transports us to a vanished time we seem to touch, while intimating something sublime and unutterable in the spaces between the words.
Book recommendation: Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald
Listen: Susannah Clapp and Hermione Lee discuss Penelope Fitzgerald
This week: The golden age
To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite. — Novalis5
The central character of The Blue Flower is Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), better known by his pen name Novalis. In Fitzgerald’s novel, he is called Fritz.
A poet, philosopher and novelist, Novalis played a key role in the development of German Romanticism. This philosophical and artistic movement rejected the rationalism and empiricism of the Enlightenment, focusing instead on individual experience, free will, and imagination.
Novalis died in 1801 at the age of 28. The events in The Blue Flower take place before he took his pen name and wrote his most famous work. But his philosophy, and the imagery and themes of his poem, Hymns to the Night, and his unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, are scattered throughout the story.
Watch: An introduction to Novalis (contains spoilers for the plot of The Blue Flower)
Pollen and Fragments
The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds.6
With the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis developed the fragment as a literary form; small pieces that excite the imagination and evoke infinite possibilities. Novalis published these fragments as Pollen, named after the powder by which flowers cross-fertilise. His epigraph for Pollen read:
Friends, the soil is poor, we must scatter seed abundantly for even a moderate harvest.
His nom de plume is derived from an ancestral family name meaning “newly cleared ground.”
Fitzgerald reproduces this form in The Blue Flower, arranging the book into fifty-five short chapters – fragments of life and thought – that describe precise moments while suggesting something sublime running above or below the story. These fragments are reassembled in the reader’s imagination, creating something unique each time we read.
Light and dark
To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night.7
Novalis was concerned with how love, imagination and poetry might transcend and unite opposites: self and other, subject and object, life and death. These ideas are explored in his poem Hymns to the Night, full of strange and mystical verse that juxtaposes light and dark. Fitzgerald uses these stark, contrasting images throughout The Blue Flower.
The golden age and the blue flower
‘It is possible to make the world new,’ said Fritz, ‘or rather to restore it to what it once was, for the golden age was certainly once a reality.’
Novalis lived in revolutionary times. He was optimistic and confident that the golden age was inevitable and almost here. But his philosophy paradoxically looks back to a pre-modern age before the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the disenchantment of the world.
The golden age is within our grasp, but the blue flower remains unfound. The quest for the blue flower appears in his posthumously published and incomplete novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen. But we will return to this later when the blue flower appears in the story.
Footnotes and tangents
1. Pay attention
“I always feel the reader is very insulted by being told too much.”8
Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels are light, lean and trim, but they are not simple. A peculiar double-negative in the first sentence warns us to stay alert and pay attention9:
Jacob Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend’s home on the washday.
So is Jacob a fool or not? The Blue Flower is full of unresolved and uncertain observations. Jacob is a minor character, but we enter this world through his eyes, arriving as a stranger to a strange house on washday.
Footnote: The Georgian Wash Day
Make the mundane sacred, implores Novalis. Well, what could be more mundane and prosaic than laundering underwear.10 And Fitzgerald lends these clothes a haunting spirit:
The underwear of children and young persons, as well as the larger sizes, fluttered through the blue air, as though the children themselves had taken to flight.
Notice the colour of the air. And the unusual use of articles (“the washday”) and prepositions (“to flight”) that give the impression of a story translated in time and space.
Fitzgerald loves precise detail: the Hardenberg is “the largest but two in Weissenfels”, and Dietmahler has “no more” than 89 shirts. The Hardenbergs have only one washday a year, and as Dietmahler notes, this is usually a sign of wealth and status. But that is not the case here, as we soon see.
2. The Hardenbergs
“This is not my house,” says Fritz’s father, the Freiherr.11
The Hardenbergs are hard up, a minor aristocratic family ruined by the Seven Years’ War.12 The Freiherr has been compelled to sell his lands and take a government job as the Director of the Salt Mines. And this has brought his family to Kloster Gasse in Weissenfels.
There are scattered hints about their economic state. In chapter 7, they are drinking coffee “partly made” from burnt carrot powder. Fitzgerald knew something of this: unable to afford a house in London, she moved her family to a boat in 1960. Life on the barge was hard, and sometimes she ate blackboard chalk to stave off hunger.
The Freiherr had joined the Moravian Church, a Protestant sect that began in Bohemia sixty years before Martin Luther. The religion of Fritz’s father dictates the rhythms and conversation of the house. The worldliness of guests and parties is discouraged. Revolutionary talk is strictly off limits. A cuckoo in the nest, Fritz’s ideas will not conform to the catechism:
'Could he not answer these questions?' cried the Freiherr. 'It may be that he could, but the answers he gave in fact were not correct. A child of not quite ten years old, he insists that the body is not flesh, but the same stuff as the soul.'
More: The Moravian Church
3. The thing in itself
What on earth is Fritz talking about on page two of The Blue Flower:
‘Gentlemen! Look at the washbasket! Let your thought be the washbasket! Have you thought the washbasket? Now then, gentlemen, let your thought be on that that thought the washbasket!’
It isn’t until chapter 8 that we realise that he is lampooning his professor at the University of Jena, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814).
Fichte’s ideas got the Romanticism ball rolling in the 1790s by rejecting Immanuel Kant’s concept of the thing-in-itself. Kant argued that everything we know about the world is filtered through our senses and experience. There is the thing-in-itself and the thing-as-it-appears-to-us.
Very well, said Fichte. But since we cannot know this thing-in-itself, it isn’t much use as a concept. The only certainty is that there is a self that experiences the world and creates our understanding of it. Fichte puts the self (the ‘Ich’) at the centre of his philosophy.
Fichte’s lectures at Jena were immensely popular. “Ich” mania had taken over the town, as we see in chapter eight:
Late into the windy lamp-lit autumn night Jena’s students met to fichtisieren, to talk about Fichte and his system. They appeared to be driving themselves mad.
Fichte believed the focus on the self would improve society by making us take responsibility for our actions. Liberating the self from rules and traditions would allow us to master our instincts and do our duty to the world.
Fritz (alias Novalis) believes that it is not duty that holds us together, but imagination and love:
‘I see the fault in Fichte’s system. There is no place in it for love.’
Book recommendation: Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf
4. Fathers and sons
The Freiherr unfolded it and uncreased it, took out his spectacles and in front of his silent family bent his attention on the closely printed front page. At first he said, ‘I don’t understand what I am reading.’
The Blue Flower is set in and around the year 1794. For the last five years, Europe has been transfixed by events unfolding in France. The Revolution is exciting the young generation in Germany, and we see this first with Fritz’s younger brother, Bernhard. He has lost his “red cap”, the Phrygian or liberty cap adopted by the Jacobin revolutionaries in Paris.
‘I don’t know how you got hold of it,’ Fritz told him. ‘And if Father had every caught sight of it he would in any case have told the servants to throw it on the rubbish heap.’
Those of you who joined us for the slow read of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety will be all to familiar with recent events. In January 1793, the National Convention condemned King Louis XVI to be guillotined. The relatively moderate Girondins were currently in control, but would soon lose power to the more radical Jacobins, led by Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre.
‘You know that your father does not like…’ 'He will be quite happy with the Girodins,' said Karl. 'But Karl, these people may perhaps have new ideas. He does not like new ideas.'
I cannot escape the observation that so many of our slow reads have been concerned with the relationships between fathers and sons. Walter and Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall. Unoka and Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart. At the start of A Place of Greater Safety, Mantel asks:
What do we think about fathers? Important, or not?
She goes on to quote Rousseau, who compared the nation to a family and the king to its father. Here in The Blue Flower, the Hardenberg children are in rebellion against their strict and pious father. Jacob calls his friend Fritz “a poet and a philosopher”, but the Freiherr says his son will follow him down the mines as “an Assistant Inspector of Salt Mines.”
5. New ideas and His Mightiness, Big Cross
‘What did they talk about?’ 'Nature-philosophy, galvanism, animal magnetism and freemasonry,' said Fritz.
At the age of twelve, Novalis was sent to live with his uncle in Lucklum. We have a painting of Uncle Wilhelm with his “big cross.” Wilhelm introduced Novalis to the ideas of the Enlightenment, as well as to Shakespeare and contemporary writers such as Lessing and Goethe.
The study of nature and the natural world will be an essential part of German Romanticism. Galvanism and Mesmerism were contemporary ideas about how electricity and magnetism might be a unifying force that links living and inert matter. In Chapter Eight, we learn that Friedrich Schiller and his doctor, Johann Stark, are believers in the Brownian system, influenced by Galvanism and Mesmerism.
Dr Brown, of Edinburgh, had cured a number of patients by refusing to let blood, and by recommending exercise, sufficient sex, and fresh air.
All these “new ideas” view the self, the body, nature and the world as unified systems held together by invisible forces. Everything is one, and everything is connected. These ideas are fueling Fritz’s imagination and are in the air of student life at the University of Jena.
6. Welcome to Jena, the “Kingdom of Philosophy”
Jena itself was small. A university town of only four and a half thousand inhabitants who lived in around eight hundred houses, it was part of the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, a principality headed by Duke Carl August. Geographically, the duchy was located at the centre of the German territories and at the crossroads of many postal routes – with travellers and mail bags arriving from Bohemia, Saxony, Prussia, Westphalia, Frankfurt and elsewhere, brining letters, books and newspapers filled with the latest political and philosophical writings.
— Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels
I recommend Wulf’s book on the Jena Set of German philosophers for an enlightening and readable introduction to the world of Novalis. For around a decade, between 1794 and 1806, Jena became the centre of European philosophy and the crucible of a constellation of ideas about the mind, creativity, art, imagination and nature that transformed everything.
The Jena Set changed our world. They did so irrevocably. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and ways of understanding the world without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.
There are many ways to read a book. I find The Blue Flower maddening and intoxicating, and Fritz is often insufferably self-absorbed. But the obsessions and energies that electrify these pages seem to speak to me and to us in our times: what are we? What animates us? What are we searching for? Is it out there or in here, and can it be found?
Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Next week, we will read chapters 9–17. The reading schedule, weekly posts and further resources can all be found on the main page for The Blue Flower at Footnotes & Tangents.
This slow read and book guide is free. If you have enjoyed it and found it helpful, please consider a paid subscription or a one-off donation to support Footnotes & Tangents. Thank you!
In the comments, let us know what caught your eye and ask the group any questions you may have. And if you’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole or taken your reading off on a tangent, please share where you have been and what you have found.
Until next time, I wish everyone happy and adventurous reading.
Simon
The Golden Child (1977) is a comic murder mystery that she wrote for her terminally ill husband, Desmond.
When does creativity peak?, The Atlantic.
Her father, Edmund “Evoe” Knox, was the editor of Punch magazine. His brothers were the writer and theologian Ronald Knox, the cryptographer Dillwyn Knox, and the Bible scholar Wilfred Knox. Fitzgerald published The Knox Brothers in 1977.
As quoted in “Bildung in Early German Romanticism” by Frederick C. Beiser, in Philosophers on Education: Historical Perspectives (1998) by Amélie Rorty, p. 294
Novalis, Fragment No. 114 from Pollen and Fragments.
Novalis, Hymns to the Night.
When we read Fitzgerald, we expect to be knocked off kilter, for our attention to be misdirected, our expectations undermined, the scene cut short, our thoughts left in the light.
Novalis is on an inward quest for meaning. The joke is that the first thing you encounter on this quest is your underwear. Readers of Wolf Hall may remember the cardinal’s advice to Thomas Cromwell: “Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear underneath their clothes.”
Freiherr was a titled rank within the Holy Roman Empire that roughly corresponds to an English baron.
Sometimes referred to as the “real” First World War, the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) was a global conflict that pitched Britain and Prussia against France and Austria.
I think I'd prefer a party at the Rostovs or tea with the Bennetts over an invitation to the Hardenbergs – what a great surname, you'd think it was made up if we didn't know they really existed!
Thank you for this very helpful introduction, Simon!
Already I am finding the book a total delight, to my surprise. I read the book back when it first came out and, never having read anything before by Fitzgerald, I didn’t get it. This time around, I come to The Blue Flower having read all of Fitzgerald’s other novels two or three times over, as well as Lee’s outstanding biography of Fitzgerald. And this time I get it! I keep chuckling to myself over the dry humor—Sidonie’s adolescent conviction that she is more sensible than her mother (she may well be!), the Bernhard’s blunt prognostication that they will cut off Louis’s head, the Freiherr’s refusal to read the newspaper—and his wife’s machinations to make sure he has access to its information—it is all so much fun!
It has is quite an achievement to convey the humor and small joys in the midst of lives that were undeniably grim (think, for example of Dietmahler’s devastating remark that he lost three siblings in a single year, for example).
I think that Fritz’s unexplained parody of Fichte on the first page is Fitzgerald teaching us how to read her. She wants us to hold all the details in mind as we wait for the moment when they will suddenly make sense to us.
I’m looking forward to everyone’s thoughts, and to next week’s reading!