The Blue Flower: Further Resources
Support for our slow read of Penelope Fitzgerald's novel
Hello!
To accompany our slow read of The Blue Flower, F&T researcher has compiled a list of additional resources to support our reading. Below you’ll find links to interviews, reviews, and articles about Penelope Fitzgerald and The Blue Flower, as well as background reading on Friedrich von Hardenberg and German Romanticism.
NB: There was a typo in the reading schedule sent out last week: the Week One reading is the first 8 chapters.
— Simon
Our slow read of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower begins on 3 November 2025 and runs for seven weeks. Join here.
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Penelope Fitzgerald: In Her Own Words
Articles and Interviews
An Author of a Certain Age - The New York Times
Nonfiction Books
A House of Air by Penelope Fitzgerald - a collection of Penelope Fitzgerald’s reviews, essays and autobiographical writings. Reviews by Literary Review, The Independent, The Times
So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terrence Dooley. Reviews by The LRB, The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Times, Literary Review, The Hudson Review
For Penelope Fitzgerald’s many reviews and articles for the London Review of Books, see here, behind a paywall.
In the Words of Others
Reviews and Retrospectives of The Blue Flower
(2023) Rereading: The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald — not ‘a dotty old woman’ with a shopping bag - paywall
(2022) Penelope Fitzgerald, Novalis, and The Blue Flower - Slant Books
(2017) Penelope Fitzgerald: “I have been reading steadily for seventeen years; when I go down I want to start writing” — Eli Lee – minor literature[s]
(2017) The Peripatetic Penelope Fitzgerald | Lucy Scholes | Granta
(2017) The Blue Flower’s elusive magic | Penelope Fitzgerald | The Guardian
(2015) Classic read: The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald - paywall
(2013) Book of a lifetime: The Blue Flower, By Penelope Fitzgerald | The Independent
(2000) Morals and metaphysics by AS Byatt
(1997) ‘Nonsense Is Only Another Language’, Review of The Blue Flower by Michael Hoffman, New York Times
(1997) Paradise in a Dream | Richard Holmes | The New York Review of Books (paywall)
(1995) Frank Kermode · Dark Fates
Articles
(2024) The prudence of Penelope Fitzgerald | The New Criterion by Richard Tillinghast
(2017) Penelope Fitzgerald webchat with Hermione Lee – as it happened
(2016) Portrait of the Author as a Historian: Penelope Fitzgerald | History Today - paywall
(2015) By Heart: Mary-Beth Hughes on Penelope Fitzgerald’s Novel ‘The Blue Flower’ - The Atlantic
(2014) Penelope Fitzgerald Is a Great Novelist—Don’t Be Surprised - the Paris Review
(2014) The Victory of Penelope Fitzgerald | Alan Hollinghurst | The New York Review of Books - paywall
(2013) Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee – review | Biography books | The Guardian
(2010) From the margins: Hermione Lee on Penelope Fitzgerald | Books | The Guardian
(2008) How did she do it? By Julian Barnes| Fiction | The Guardian
(2008) The quiet genius of Penelope Fitzgerald | Fiction | The Guardian
(2000) Penelope Fitzgerald | Books | The Guardian - obituary
Podcasts
(2021) Revivalism: Penelope Fitzgerald, with Susannah Clapp and Hermione Lee | London Review Bookshop
Books
(2018) Penelope Fitzgerald: Writers and Their Work by Hugh Adlington
(2017) Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction by Christopher Knight
(2014) Penelope Fitzgerald by Hermione Lee (reviews here: the New Yorker, the Guardian, Slate, Financial Times, Telegraph)
(2004) Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald by Peter Wolfe
Academic Works: Available with Login or Purchase
Papers, Articles, Theses & Chapters
(2025) Penelope Fitzgerald and the Field of Consciousness by Larry Lohmann
(2025) Tarare by Matthew James Sefton
(2024) “Apotheosis of Poesy”: The blue flower as a Romantic theory of the novel | Neohelicon by Guibing Qin
(2023) Penelope Fitzgerald and Edward Burne-Jones: The Spirit of Her Work | The Cambridge Quarterly | Oxford Academic by William Ghosh
(2023) Reflections of Postmodernism in Penelope Fitzgerald’s “The Blue Flower”: A Histographic Novel by Melike Sultan Çiçekler
(2021) How Bilingual Novelists Utilize their Linguistic Knowledge: Towards a Typology of the Contemporary ‘Modern Languages Novel’ in English by Julian Preece and Aled Rees
(2020) Out of Order: Women’s Time in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower by Merrill Turner
(2017) Imagination, Irreality, and the Constitution of Knowledge in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower by Elisabet Dellming
(2016) Table Talk, The Threepenny Review by Richard Locke
(2013) Quest for Independent Existence in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower by Lata Subedi
(2009) There’s a Providence Not so Far Away from Us: Penelope Fitzgerald’s Parablistic Realism by Don Adams
(2006) Ph.D. Postmortem Postmodernists: Authorship and Cultural Revisionism in Late Twentieth-Century Narrative by Laura E. Savu
(2007) New Voice, Old Body: the Case of Penelope Fitzgerald | Contemporary Women’s Writing | Oxford Academic by Stephanie Harzewski
(2006) Goethe Lite: The Fictionalization of German Literati by Katya Skow
(2005) A Completely Determined Human Being by Dean Flower
(2000) Oh, Subtle | Salmagundi by Ian Sansom
(1999) Penelope Fitzgerald’s fiction and literary career: form and context by Lian Lu
(1998) A Delicate Form of Genius by A.S. Byatt
(1998) Review: The Blue Flower | World Literature Today by Mona Knapp
(1998) Review: The Blue Flower / The Bookshop | Antioch Review by Gerda Oldham
(1998) Skirting the Precipice: Truth and Audience in Literature by Bruce Fleming
(1998) The Blue Flower: review, The Missouri Review by Evelyn Somers
(1997) Review: Love in the Time of Tuberculosis, The Blue Flower, for the Women’s Review of Books by Dagmar Herzog
(1997) Elements of Compression in the Novels of Penelope Fitzgerald by Julian Gitzen
Historical Context
Primary Sources
Writings of Friedrich von Hardenberg (later known as Novalis)
Birth of Novalis, The: Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Journal of 1797, with Selected Letters and Documents (SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory)
Henry of Ofterdingen: A Romance. by Novalis, Translated by John Owen (1842) - Novalis’ unfinished novel, containing the blue flower
The Disciples at Saïs and Other Fragments by Novalis, translated by Una Birch and F.V.M.T., including excerpts from his note-book about Sophie von Kühn and her own brief diary excerpts too, pp.21-27
Novalis: Philosophical Writings (Margaret Mahony Stoljar, trans.)
Novalis’s Pollen, Translated by Jakob Minor - Wikisource and Paralipomena of Pollen
Novalis - Hymns to the Night, Translated by George Macdonald
Novalis: Spiritual Songs (also known as Exotics) Translated by George MacDonald
Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia by Novalis
Other
Fanny D’Arblay’s letter to her sister Esther Burney about her mastectomy, 30 September 1811 - Penelope Fitzgerald notes this as her source of the description of an operation without an anaesthetic.
Secondary Sources
The German Romantics
Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf
History of Ideas: Romanticism
Lecture 5 from Isaiah Berlin’s Famous 1965 Series on Romanticism: Unbridled Romanticism - Fichte, Schelling, & Symbols (written as a chapter here)
The Jena Romantics: F. Schlegel, Novalis & the Athenaeum Journal with Dr. Nathan Brown (Concordia)
Friedrich von Hardenberg (later known as Novalis)
Novalis | German Romantic Poet & Philosopher | Britannica
Novalis - Wikipedia
Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg [Novalis] | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772-1801) | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Thomas Carlyle: Novalis (his famous essay from 1829)
Novalis and the Blue Flower: The Romantic School in Germany - The Atlantic
Other Characters
Sophie von Kühn - Wikipedia
Friedrich Schiller | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Friedrich Schiller | German Poet, Playwright, Historian | Britannica
Friedrich Schiller - Wikipedia
Johann Gottlieb Fichte | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Johann Gottlieb Fichte | German Idealist, Philosopher & Educator | Britannica
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Johann Gottlieb Fichte - Wikipedia
Friedrich Schlegel - Wikipedia
Friedrich Schlegel | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Friedrich von Schlegel | German Romantic Poet, Critic & Philosopher | Britannica
August Wilhelm Schlegel - Wikipedia
August Wilhelm von Schlegel | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
August Wilhelm von Schlegel | German Scholar, Critic & Poet | Britannica
Incredible! Thank you very much. But Simon do you think your followers will find 48h in a day just for reading? 😂
Wow! This is fabulous. Thank you