The Blue Flower #2: Everything was illuminated

Footnotes & Tangents for chapters 9–17 of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

‘When I came into your home, everything, the wine-decanter, the tea, the sugar, the chairs, the dark green tablecloth with its abundant fringe, everything was illuminated.’
   'They are as usual. I did not buy this furniture myself, but –'
   Fritz tried to explain that he had seen not their everyday, but their spiritual selves. He could not tell when these transfigurations would come to him. When the moment came it was as the whole world would be when body at last became subservient to soul.

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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 2 of this slow read, we are reading chapters 9–17. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading these chapters before returning to this post to join the discussion.

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Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818. Source.

This week: Everything was illuminated

Last week, we found our feet in Fritz’s world. This week, we feel life as Fritz does: with an intensity and an all-encompassing energy that makes everything interesting and illuminated. High above the sea of fog, he holds “one and a half fingers and the heavy ring” in his mouth, and thinks: “All Nature is one.”

The sublime and the grotesque, the sacred and the profane. The ordinary and the extraordinary.

In Magnificent Rebels, Andrea Wulf introduces Novalis as “a ravenous reader … animated by an almost childish cheerfulness.”

He regarded the ordinary with wonder, and the unusual with acceptance. He slept little and worked hard. Novalis claimed never to be bored and whatever he studied or learned, he did so with enthusiasm – be it studying philosophical books, reading poetry or clerking with a magistrate and tax collector to learn about administration and management in preparation for work at the family-run salt mines. Everybody agreed that there was something magical, intense and almost hypnotic about him. Women and men alike fell for him. He 'electrified me', one woman said, and another admirer admitted that 'few people in my entire life have left such a deep impression.'¹

Perhaps we all know someone who can “light up a room.” Maybe we seek out that intensity that illuminates and binds us to all things? The character of Fritz is mesmerising as much as he is clownish and foolish. In The Blue Flower, we are simultaneously seduced by Fritz’s idea that everything is poetry while suspecting, uneasily, that some things are not.

Fritz/Novalis electrifies people. This week, he electrifies Karoline and her uncle. He is interested in the ideas of “one of his greatest friends in Jena, the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter”. Galvanism was the belief in “animal electricity,” an energy that was believed to animate organic matter. In Jena, many frogs will die in the search for this invisible life force, and Mary Shelley later turned these ideas into science fiction in Frankenstein.

• Beyond blue: In 1801, Johann Wilhelm Ritter discovered ultraviolet light

• Making a monster: The science behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Victor Frankenstein seeks to play god and create life, the “modern Prometheus”, who steals fire from heaven and is punished. But if Frankenstein is the arrogant scientist, Fritz/Novalis is the innocent poet. Wandering the roads between Wittenberg and Weissenfels, on his slow and shabby horse, he paints a picture of a quixotic knight in a medieval romance.²

He’s on a quest for something, but he doesn’t know what it is or where to find it. That openness is attractive. But he is innocent and unobservant. Sometimes he and his horse ride right past the truth, or crush it under hoof. On the last page of this week’s reading, he asks Karoline, “What is the meaning of the blue flower?” She has fallen in love with him, but he doesn't see it. She offers an answer, but he doesn’t hear it:

‘The young man has to go away from his home to find it. He only wants to see it, he does not want to possess it. It cannot be poetry, he knows what that is already. It can’t be happiness, he wouldn’t need a stranger to tell him what that is, and as far as I can see he is already happy in his home.’

The university prison (Karzer) in Jena. Old postcard, 1919. Source.

Footnotes and tangents

1. Student life

Fritz was not likely to forget the sensation of the one and a half fingers and the heavy ring, smooth and hard while they were yielding, in his mouth.

One short chapter brings to life the wild world of being a student at Jena in the 1790s. Fitzgerald lets our imagination fill in the details. This is clearly the morning Fritz and Jacob become friends, as a witness and a doctor for an illegal duel – over what and against whom, no one says. Fritz and his friends were up to no good last night, and although we don’t know what, everyone except Fritz is now in the students’ prison.

The less we know, the more we must imagine.

German university prisons were called karzers. I can’t find the page reference from Magnificent Rebels, but I believe the karzer at Jena was indeed known as “the Black Hole”, a reference to the infamous prison at Fort William in Calcutta, into which the British were thrown for their defiance of the Nawab of Bengal.

• Footnote: In 1822, the Swiss painter Martin Disteli was incarcerated in the karzer at Jena and left his graffiti on the walls

• Tangent: The Black Hole of Calcutta

Jena was a law unto itself. “There was no university like it in Europe,” writes Andrea Wulf. It was under the jurisdiction of four different duchies, and thus it often seemed as though no one was in charge. The curriculum was broad, modern, and exciting, in contrast to more conservative institutions like Oxford and Cambridge. Unlike larger German cities, there were no theatres or other distractions, so students had nothing to do but study… and have sex (a quarter of all births in Jena were illegitimate) … and fight duels. “Foolish, crazy acts,” was how Novalis later referred to these student excesses.³

It was still only four o’clock in the morning, but as they tramped up in the direction of Galgenberg they could feel the whole stagnant little town beginning to steam in its early summer heat.

Galgenberg corresponds to the English “Gallows Hill”. The Schläger (“hitter”) duelling swords had evolved from a deadly Rennaisance weapon into a ceremonial tool and symbol of academic fencing. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, duelling scars (“Mensur scars”) became a badge of honour among upper-class Germans and Austrians.

• Footnote: The Evolution of the Schläger

• Tangent: Mensur And Bragging Scars

Galgenberg in Jena, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938). Source.

2. The responsible son

‘And I know now that I need discipline. I have romantic tendencies. In a barracks these will be corrected by the practical, unromantic duties of my daily life – the shit house, the fever ward, the route march, foot inspection.’

Penelope Fitzgerald and Fritz/Novalis wrongfoot us again in this section. In Week One, we were given an impractical boy-philosopher resisting the narrow path set for him by his father. Once he’s spent all his allowance, we anticipate a collision course with reality (à la Nikolai Rostov in War and Peace).

Instead, we learn that Fritz is not just a daydreamer. In Magnificent Rebels, Wulf notes that Novalis is one of the more socially conservative and conventional members of the Jena set, despite his cult status as the epitome of romantic youth. He declares his intention to get a job and support the family. This strikes his philosopher friends as almost eccentric. Dorothea asks,

‘why is our Hardenberg dragging round like a clerk under the orders of some tedious Kreisamtmann?’

A Kreisamtmann is a district administrator, and Dorothea’s comment exposes her academic snobbishness, because Coelestin Just is far from tedious, and through the encouragement of Fritz, becomes curious about fiction, to the dismay of the Freiherr!

Meanwhile, Fritz is reading nonfiction. Specifically, Franz Ludwig Cancrinus’ Foundations of Mining and Saltworks – a book Fitzgerald read for her research. The verbatim table of contents tells us something about Fritz: he’s actually quite interested in salt mines. Of course he is, because everything interests Novalis.

And the underground world of the mines will work its way into his poetry and philosophy.

Caroline Schlegel. Source.

3. Mainz and the brilliant Caroline Schlegel

At the start of Chapter 12, we are told that Fritz’s brother Karl had seen action, aged only sixteen, “when the French were driven out of Mainz.”

We should keep in mind that this entire story is set against the backdrop of the wars between Revolutionary France and a coalition of European monarchies. Our young protagonists are almost all enthusiasts for the Revolution, and they now find their loyalties divided.

Fellow readers of A Place of Greater Safety may remember how Danton stole the French crown jewels (topical!) to bribe the enemy into losing the Battle of Valmy, a decisive turning point in the war. The French launched a counterattack and seized Mainz, located on the left bank of the Rhine.

Some of the city’s inhabitants were sympathetic to the aims of the Revolutionary army. One of these was the widow, Caroline Böhmer, a native of Göttingen in Lower Saxony. Arrested by the Prussians and accused of fraternising with revolutionaries, Caroline and her seven-year-old daughter, Auguste, were thrown into the fortress at Königstein.

They were released a few months later. In 1796, she married the scholar August Wilhelm Schlegel, and they moved to Jena. Andrea Wulf writes:

Caroline became the heart and mind of a group of young men and women who hoped to change the world. She was a muse and critic who contributed to their literary works – and her home was the physical space where they met, thought, talked, laughed and wrote.⁴

We glimpse her briefly in Chapter 16, alongside Dorthea and the Schlegel brothers. Coelestin Just is perturbed by “the behaviour of the Jena women.” They keep open relationships, have several lovers, and harbour new and dangerous ideas.

Harvest landscape in the foothills of the Harz Mountains, Albert König, 1920. Source.

4. All happiness is here

From the age of seventeen he had been in almost perpetual motion, or the Gual’s unhurried version of it, back and forth, though not over a wide area.

Fritz/Novalis never left this “golden hollow” in the Holy Roman Empire. His world was small, his horizons near, compared to those of his friend Alexander von Humboldt, who would traverse the jungles, rivers and mountains of South America and become the most famous explorer of his age.

• More: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science

But while Alexander explores the external world, Fritz goes inward in search of… in search of what?

The hometowns were reassuring to the traveller, who fixed his sights from a distance on the wooden roof of the old church, the cupola of the new one, and came at length to the streets of small houses drawn up in order, each with its pig sty, its prune oven and bread oven and sometimes its wooden garden-house, where the master, in the cool of the evening, sat smoking in total blankness of mind, under a carved motto: ALL HAPPINESS IS HERE or CONTENTMENT IS WEALTH. Sometimes, though not often, a woman, also, found time to sit in the garden-house.

A recurring theme in Fitzgerald’s work is the quest for happiness for ourselves and for others. These innocent aims often have unfortunate consequences. In Fitzgerald’s novels, happiness and happy endings are elusive and bittersweet. Fritz passes by happy farmers resting in a peaceful bucolic landscape. But Fitzgerald notes that the women are far too busy – “sausage-making, beating flax for the winter spinning, killing the geese” – to enjoy the wealth of contentment and the happiness of here.

The opium poppy, Papaver somniferum. Source.

5. Not the blue flower: Opium and Romanticism

Fritz’s exuberance raises concerns in the Just house at Tennstedt. Rahel Just,

allowed herself to wonder whether he was obliged, on medical advice, to take much opium? For toothache, of course, everyone had to take it, she did not mean that.

With a bit of snooping (à la the Bernhard), she finds out Fritz does take opium, but only half the dose she takes “for a woman’s usual aches and pains.” This is a reminder that almost everyone at this time is taking laudanum, a tinture of opium, and many people are addicted.

Let us note that opium is extracted from the seeds of a flowering plant, although the opium poppy flower is usually red, white or purple, rather than blue.

Rahel considers whether Fritz’s romanticism is the result of mind-altering drugs. She’ll not be the first to contemplate the link between opium and romanticism, and several of the romantic poets were indeed addicted to opium, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

• More: Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter

• Tangent: Morphinomania in the 19th century

Natura morta con cameriera, Justus Juncker, 1746. Source.

6. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister

‘Karoline, you must read Wilhelm Meister.’

Wilhelm Meister is the protagonist of two novels by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great-grandaddy of German Romanticism. In his youth, he wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), popularising the image of the tragic romantic hero, fatally in love beyond all sense and reason. Fritz (alias Novalis) will follow in the footsteps of Young Werther.

• More: Goethe’s dangerous romantic hero influenced fashion, fiction – and Napoleon

Goethe is now a middle-aged courtier with an expanding waistline, hanging out in Jena with his new bestie, the playwright Friedrich Schiller, studying rocks and plants, and working on his magnum opus, the play Faust.

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796) is the first coming-of-age novel (or Bildungsroman). Its protagonist seeks self-fulfilment by following his dreams and becoming an actor. His name, Wilhelm, is a nod to Shakespeare, whom the Romantics adored and translated into German.

Wilhelm’s journey takes him from his dreams into the world. Novalis became convinced that the path to fulfilment should go in the opposite direction. His own novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800), will be a reaction to Wilhelm Meister’s worldliness, a magical, allegorical journey into the self:

The way leads inwards, always inwards.

And it is here, in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, that Novalis writes about the blue flower.

‘I found Mignon very irritating.’ Mignon by William Bouguereau. Source.

7. Karoline Just and Mignon

In Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the hero meets a mysterious thirteen-year-old girl, Mignon, who seems wise beyond her years and expresses herself only through song. The figure of Mignon has inspired paintings, operas, music, film and television – and she’ll leave her mark on Fritz/Novalis.

• Watch: An excellent overview of Goethe’s Mignon and the compositions she influenced

Karoline Just is the complete opposite of Mignon. She is unromatnic and practical and confesses to “not dream very much.” When Fritz is philosophising, she is busy running the house and sensibly preparing for winter:

Neither the sewing nor the forewinter sausage-chopping deterred him. As she chopped, Karoline learned that the world is tending day by day not towards destruction, but towards infinity.

Fritz and Karoline are, as he suggests, thesis and anti-thesis, and Karoline’s industry offers a gentle satire of Fritz’s philosophical navel-gazing. She catches him off guard because she has, “of course”, read Wilhelm Meister. She unromantically volunteers her opinion that Mignon,

‘dies because Goerthe couldn’t think what to do with her next. If he had made her marry Wilhelm Meister, that would have served both of them right.’
   'You are very severe in your judgements,' said Fritz.

What’s lovely about this whole exchange is that Fitzgerald creates space for both characters to be right. Fritz is silly, but sincere. Karoline is surely very severe but also fair and sensible. Instead of rejecting her interpretation outright, Fritz absurdly pens a poem about her eyebrows in praise of her “good advice” and nicknames her Justen, the just one.

It’s a boy’s name, and Fritz calls her his friend (“Karoline did not contradict this”). He is clueless and completely oblivious to the unspoken fact that Karoline has quietly and involuntarily fallen in love with him.

She would rather cut off one of her hands than disappoint him, as he sat looking at her, trusting and intent, with his large light-brown eyes, impatient for a sign of comprehension.

Primavera, Sandro Botticelli. Source.

8. The Blue Flower

‘I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower. It lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think about nothing else. Never did I feel like this before. It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world.’

This fragment that Frtiz shares with Karoline is the first sentence of Novalis’ book, Heinrich von Ofterdingen. We can explore later what Fritz/Novalis and others have meant by the blue flower, but I’d like to use this first opportunity to talk specifically about Penelope Fitzgerald and the blue flower.⁵

Fitzgerald said she first encountered the blue flower in DH Lawrence’s novella The Fox (1922). Lawrence describes the “awful mistake” of pursuing an idealised form of happiness:

The more you reached after the fatal flower of happiness, which trembles blue and lovely in a crevice just beyond your grasp, the more fearfully you become aware of the ghastly and awful gulf of the precipice below you, into which you will inevitably plunge, as into the bottomless pit, if you reach any further. The flower itself – its calyx is a horrible gulf, it is the bottomless pit.

Lawrence was inspired by Novalis, but Fitzgerald’s mind went off on a tangent. She thought of the Himalayan blue poppy, Meconopsis baileyi. “The most wonderful flower. It’s like the black swan, you know, you just don’t know what to say when you see it.”

The Himalayan blue poppy. Meconopsis baileyi. Source.

However, Fitzgerald notes that Novalis cannot have been thinking of the blue poppy because it wasn’t known in Europe before 1911. In her biography, Hermione Lee mentions that Fitzgerald discarded a subplot to The Blue Flower in which two explorers find the Himalayan poppy near the Tibetan border.

• Tangent: Fitzgerald imagined her explorers searching for the legendary Tsangpo River Falls described by Tibetan monks. In 1993, the Buddhist scholar Ian Baker began a five-year search for these “Hidden Falls”, leading an expedition into the world's deepest canyon to find the falls in 1998. More here.

There were other sources of Fitzgerald’s interest in the blue flower. For her biography on Edward Burne-Jones, her research led her to the painter’s work on the language of flowers, The Flower Book. Fitzgerald had considered writing her own book on the symbolism of flowers in the Rennaisance.

• Tangent: Myth and Meaning in Edward Burne-Jones’s The Flower Book

If Novalis had a precise flower in mind, it may have been the blue alpine gentian, like the one found pressed between the pages of John Ruskin’s Unto This Last at the end of her novel, The Bookshop. In Fitzgerald’s notes for her Italian book Innocence, Lee found a reference to gentians in Boticelli’s Primavera:

‘The gentian is one of the flowers issuing from the mouth of the nymph on the right, who is being blown into life by the south wind. She blows first cold then warm, and the first flower that issues from her mouth is the blue gentian, as though it had just emerged from the snows. The gentian is strikingly accurate.’

• Watch: In the garden with Venus, Botticelli’s Primavera

• Watch: Botticelli helps you change: Art Doctor Quickies

Detail from Primavera by Botticelli. Source.

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 18–25. 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

1. Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels, p. 91. Bold added.

2. The medieval quest is the subject of his unfinished novel, Henry von Ofterdingen, in which the hero is searching for the elusive blue flower.

3. Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels, p. 92.

4. Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels, p. 9.

5. The quotes and observations from this section come from Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, Ch. 17. The Blue Flower.