The Blue Flower #7: Born for joy
Footnotes & Tangents for chapters 48–55 of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Magister Kegel closed his book. 'After all, these people were born for joy,' he thought.
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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 7 of this slow read, we will finish The Blue Flower and read chapters 48–55. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading these chapters before returning to this post to join the discussion.
This week: Born for joy
Rockenthien had blundered in after the Mandelsloh. ‘I have come to hear the lesson,’ he called over her shoulder, adapting his voice, as he thought, to the sick room. ‘I hope to benefit from it.’
I have been thinking a lot about The Blue Flower this week. I will suggest in this final post that we glimpse this elusive object in the book's closing chapter. But when we see it, Fritz is not there. And while we may be led to believe that the blue flower represents death, I think Penelope Fitzgerald leaves open to us another interpretation.
In some small way, Fritz’s quest for truth reminds me of Pierre Bezukhov’s search for meaning in War and Peace. Both characters are foolish and quixotic, wasting time looking in all the wrong places. Both Tolstoy and Fitzgerald locate life’s meaning in the unthinking, nonjudgmental love of others. The big difference is that, unlike Pierre, Fritz is not around to benefit from the lesson.
The book begins with a stranger arriving at the Hardenberg house. We are thrown into the centre of Fritz’s world. For a while, we run with him and his philosophy, until we see that the world is much wider than we thought. And much wider than his thoughts. And much of what the world contains is invisible to him: blue flowers bloom and wither within hidden hearts, unnoticed by our questing knight. And then finally, he becomes a stranger in this land – an enemy of the world, a foreigner to this earth. And so leaves Sophie and us to ride into the night, on the journey ever inward, and away from life.
‘If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching.’
Footnotes and tangents
1. The enchantment of childhood
‘We are enchanted here,’ said Sidonie. ‘Until we get started, we shan’t be able to realise the depth of our unhappiness.’
As Sophie approaches death, the Hardenberg children return to their childhood home. Schlöben is a powerful nexus of memories for all of them, and the Freiherr had vowed never to part with it despite their financial difficulties. And yet, after seeing Sophie in Jena, the patriarch makes the startling announcement that he will give her their ancestral home.
Old Thuringia: some evocative images of the area around Schlöben and Jena
The nature of childhood is an important theme in The Blue Flower. At Christmas, the Freiherr professed to have become “during this sacred time, wholly a child” and to leave off his strict interrogations of his own children. Childhood may be a place of innocence and untrammelled imagination. Early in the novel, Fritz tells Karoline that Goethe’s Mignon is not “irritating” but “a spirit, or a spirit-seer, more than a child.”
But this romantic idea is contested. Sophie’s immaturity enchants Fritz; it is, to him, fleeting and full of the potential of becoming. But Sophie objects that she does not want “to become” anything, and neither is she a child. Similarly, Erasmus says,
‘I should prefer us all to be children,’ said Erasmus, ‘then we should have a kingdom of our own.’ 'That is not at all my experience,' said the Bernhard.
The Angel sees it differently, the younger child who knows he will always be the youngest. Severin, the bookseller, says of the Bernhard, “not all children are child-like.” And having reached the end of the novel, we now know that very few of these children will ever fully grow up.
They lived their short lives amid a revolution in the concept of childhood. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had advocated the free and natural development of children so that they may grow into authentic versions of themselves. Rousseau inspired the German Romantics and their concept of “self-formation”, or Bildung. They invented the Bildungsroman, a genre of fiction that explored an individual’s self-actualisation from child to adult.
No longer miniature adults: The painting Hülsenbeck Children in historical context
Later in the nineteenth century, the cult of childhood idealised children's innocence in contrast to the ugly brutality of the modern industrial world. This is a theme we will pick up on again next year, in Pat Barker’s Regeneration and AS Byatt’s The Children's Book.
2. The stranger speaks of death
Where would we be without our dear Bernhard?
When a stranger comes to call at the beginning of The Blue Flower, the Bernhard makes sure to investigate his valise. He has “had a good look” at everything of interest at Weissenfels, and he has read his brother’s story about the blue flower.
He had been struck […] by one thing in particular: the stranger who had spoken at the dinner table about the Blue Flower had been understood by one person and one only. That person must have been singled out as distinct from all the rest of the family.
The suggestion that the blue flower is death was raised earlier when it was observed that Sophie’s doctor would have understood the meaning of the story. The Bernhard grasps this meaning with the idea that the angel of death may only be seen by the condemned.
It was a matter of recognising your own fate and greeting it as familiar when it came.
It is only the Bernhard who pays attention to the ticking of the clock in the wall at Schlöben. While they are all “enchanted” by the happy nostalgia of childhood, he is listening to the memento mori of the ticking clock. And as we learn in the Afterword, the boy who loved water drowned in the Saale on 28 November 1800. Fritz/Novalis died a few months later from tuberculosis, felled by the same sickness that killed his brother Erasmus and his sister Sidonie.
Sophie and Erasmus died within a few months of each other. Having lost “his philosophy” and his “best of brothers”, Novalis entered a dark inner space where he wished only to die. In his imagination, this was not conceived as suicide or a negation of life, but something he called Nachsterben, “dying afterwards” or “following into death.” He desired to be reunited with Sophie. He believed that the self – the Ich – not only created the world but could kill itself “by sheer force of will.”
This period of grief and meditation on death would inspire the six poems, Hymns to the Night, that made him famous.
Romancing death: The romantic movement and depictions of death
3. Angel in the House
The Bernhard loves the unsuitability of the marriage between Fritz and Sophie. “It is our business to see the beauty of that.” His brother disagrees.
'You should not have come here, Angel in the House,' said Erasmus angrily.
This little anachronism intrigues me. The Angel in the House was a highly influential poem by Coventry Patmore, first published in 1854. The poem romanticises women's domesticity and upholds the Victorian ideal of a male public sphere and women secluded to the private space of the home. The idea of the Angel in the House was dissected by feminists and women writers in the twentieth century, most notably by Virginia Woolf.
Professions for Women: Virginia Woolf on the Angel in the House
I am unsure of Fitzgerald’s motives for smuggling this (capitalised) phrase into The Blue Flower. After all, it is used by one brother to describe another. Nevertheless, it is an idea encircling this novel’s women, from Sidonie to Sophie, Karoline to the Freifrau. It is there in Goethe’s belief that Sophie will make Fritz happy with what “she can offer him” and “the incomparable blessing of children.”
Erasmus later thinks of the Mandelsloh as “a warrior saint, a strong angel of the battlefield.” And it is the Mandelsloh who emerges as the great hero in these final chapters, wishing to bear Sophie’s pain, and eviscerating Fritz for his cowardice in the face of Sophie’s great need.
4. The milk cure
Recovery would come in the spring, when the goat’s milk would be at its best.
I would like to learn more about these physicians and their unwavering belief in the medicinal benefits of milk. Late in 1800, Fritz/Novalis’ own health began to deteriorate. “In an attempt to get better,” Andrea Wulf writes, “he had already radically changed his diet: he drank very little wine, ate hardly any meat and essentially lived off milk and vegetables.”
The Tsar’s doctor: “On the milk cure” by Philip Karell, physician to Tsar Nicholas I (1865)
Super milk: “A treatise of the extraordinary virtues and effects of asses milk, in the cure of various diseases, particularly the gout, scurvy, and nervous disorders; and of its peculiar nourishing and restorative qualities in all consumptive disorders, and even the decays of old age” by Friedrich Hoffmann, 1754
5. A coward’s philosophy
In the closing chapters, two versions of the world seem set against one another: Fritz’s “kingdom of the mind” meets the quiet courage of the Mandelsloh.
Fitzgerald gives Fritz plenty of rope to hang himself.
A long passage lays out his manifesto of romanticism, articulated as a search for “a different kind of measurement”: the universe’s hidden algebra that unites body and soul and becomes visible to us only in fleeting “glimpses” of numinosity. We are already familiar with Fritz’s glimpses: the radiance of the ordinary at Karoline Just’s house, his first meeting with Sophie, and the vision in the churchyard at Weissenfels.
Those of you who have joined us for the War and Peace slow read may be reminded of Tolstoy’s treatment of such spiritual experiences: Andrei’s skies, Pierre’s comet and Natasha singing. Penelope Fitzgerald’s own belief in the sublime and supernatural lends sympathy to Fritz’s revelations, while she may not subscribe to his philosophy or agree with his conclusions.
‘As things are, we are the enemies of the world, and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement.’
Fitzgerald’s final two novels, The Gate of Angels and The Blue Flower, are both concerned with the separation of mind and body, and body and soul. Fritz here describes the alienation of the modern world and the Enlightenment project of measuring and categorising: “This is animate, but that is inanimate.” Nature is dissected, and the soul is disenchanted.
‘But space spills over into time, as the body into the soul, so that the one cannot be measured without the other.’
Fritz may be right. And perhaps this blue flower is worth a lifetime of searching. Perhaps it is the love that binds us all together, or death – our shared and irrefutable fate. In his writging, Novalis keeps returning to these two mysteries: love and death.
But what harm is done to the living while we wander, wondering on? If Fritz initially invested too much meaning in a vital, healthy Sophie, now he draws up a dreadful equation that seems to comprehend neither Sophie, nor love, nor her illness:
‘I love Sophie more because she is ill.’
If we are generous to Fritz, we may notice that we do, in fact, feel love more acutely when someone we love is suffering. But with great irony, Fritz writes that “Algebra, like laudanum, deadens pain”, and the effect of his philosophising is to anaesthetise himself to Sophie’s suffering. Comfortably numb, he’s of no use to her.
It is the Mandelsloh who makes this plain:
‘What can you do for her? That is all you have to ask yourself in this house.’
The Mandelsloh tells him that he is wanted not as a nurse, but as a “liar”, to tell Sophie each day that “You look a little better” and “Soon you will be able to go out into the garden.”
On 12 June 1975, Penelope Fitzgerald’s husband, Desmond, had an operation to remove part of his rectum. He was dying of cancer, and the doctors told Penelope that he could not recover from his operation. By all accounts, Desmond was not told his condition was terminal. Penelope cared for him for a little over a year until his death on 19 August 1976.
While caring for her dying husband, Fitzgerald wrote her first novel, The Golden Child, a museum mystery written “to amuse” Desmond and distract herself from what was happening.
Unlike Fritz, she stayed and offered what comfort and lies she could. But as the Mandelsloh notes, a woman has nowhere to go to be alone if she “has something that is not easy to decide.”
The world and his philosophy grant Fritz the freedom to be a coward.
Sophie waits for him to return, and imagines “in her fantasy” that she can hear his horse’s hooves. But he does not come back.
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6. Born for joy
How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
Ultimately, it is not Fritz’s philosophy that prevails. Sophie’s father asks Magister Kegel to distract Sophie with some lessons. He is against the idea. “It would be a pantomime,” he protests. And the “young people” are far too much indulged at the Rochenthien house. Nevertheless, he goes.
We do not need to be told how ill Sophie looks. It is sufficient for Kegel to comment on how fortunate her young half-siblings are that they do not remember how she looked before. He sits to read her a lesson from Cicero about friendship. But when the entire household and servants come to see her, Kegel closes his book. There is nothing for these people to learn from Cicero.
‘After all, these people were born for joy,’ he thought.
It is a phrase from one of Penelope Fitzgerald’s literary heroes, the poet-painter and radical mystic, William Blake. His poem “The School-Boy” compares a pupil stuck in school on a summer’s day to a caged bird that should be set free.
Kegel sees what Fritz cannot. The young poet makes Sophie his Philosophy, and so traps her soul with the books he has read and those he may still live to write. But what Sophie has and needs cannot be found in books.
Laughing and coughing (those two are almost indistinguishable), she holds out her arms to everyone. There isn’t anything they can do for her, but their love needs no philosophy and overflows without measure.
It is not Fritz’s “certainty of immortality”, but it is everything here and now. It can be held. It can be felt. The solace of human companionship, instinctive and unmediated by thought or weighed down by meaning.
The blue flower that the philosopher seeks but can never, ever find.
7. Reviews and analysis of The Blue Flower
Do explore our extensive page of further resources on Penelope Fitzgerald and The Blue Flower. Here is a selection of review and analysis that you may find interesting:
Frank Kermode: Dark Fates
Michael Hofmann: “Nonsense Is Only Another Language”
AS Byatt: Morals and metaphysics
Sam Jordison: The Blue Flower’s elusive magic
Thank you
And thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald.
I have thoroughly enjoyed this re-read and discovered so much, from my own research and ruminations and from your invaluable contributions in the comments. I am indebted to this community and enormously grateful.
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!
And that’s all from me this year. I hope you can join us in 2026 for some of the new slow reads, or the re-reuns of Wolf Crawl and War and Peace.
I wish everyone joyous holidays and a happy New Year full of curious and creative reading!
Simon
If I'm being fully honest, I really struggled with this book. It was almost too much symbolism or interpretation for me and not enough laid out. It definitely speaks to her mastery as an author that that's what she went for and was clearly able to pull it off, but I, as a reader, prefer at least a little bit more spelled out than she gave us. Without your overviews, Simon, I would have been totally lost. I would read the chapters and then come to your overviews and engage an entirely different depth than I had picked up on myself, almost like my reading and your interpretations were two different books.
Perhaps it was on purpose because the whole idea of the blue flower is that it's elusive and can't be grasped, but the whole book felt a bit elusive to me, or just out of reach, never quite coming into focus. Just as someone else here mentioned Fritz felt. Again, mastery at one level, but also not the most enjoyable reading experience for me personally. I found myself having trouble getting immersed in it, like I was always one step removed. Looking into the scenes and characters without actually being in them.
I definitely learned a lot about this romantic era of history, something I hadn't previously known much about. And was able to read a book I likely never would have picked up without this group's impetus. So thank you for an interesting adventure all things considered. I look forward to the next one.
Having reached the end of the book, I realise that I don't really have an impression of Fritz - not a strong one, anyway. Although we see a lot through his eyes, we don;'t really see him. (Or, at least, I didn't.)
Yes, he falls for Sophie - but there's no real reason for that. It's neither expected nor unexpected. I have a much clearer view of the Bernhard than of Fritz. That's not a criticism, I think it makes Fritz a bit ethereal - and, of course (like most of his family) he's not long for this world.
I can't imagine that I'm the only person who would welcome a novel giving the Mandelsloh's perspective. She's a real fully-formed, feet on the ground, character.
And Sophie is much more well-rounded than I first thought. Her wanting "to astound her betrothed" with "something rather showy" seems right - it's not a battle, she just wants to please Fritz. There's something incredibly sad about the line "Sophie was disappointed when she heard that Hardenberg had gone back to Weissenfels, but not excessively" - it's as if being deserted comes naturally. Low expectations of other people!
Although you'd probably describe the book as being about the Hardenbergs, when I got to the end I felt it was much more about Sophie, the Mandelsloh and Karoline - and how they dealt with the Hardenbergs.