You think I have been taken in by a beautiful face.’ Great Fritz, you are a philosopher, you are a poet … Fritz, Sophie is stupid!’ She is good-natured, yes, but she is not your intellectual equal. What on earth does Fritz see in her? The reader is not alone in being puzzled by Fritz’s love for Sophie – none of the other characters can fathom it. Today we were again alone and nothing much happened. Today once again we were alone and nothing much happened. ‘Yes, if I could have fair hair.’įitzgerald gives us an extract from Sophie’s diary:

‘But Schlegel, too, is interested in transmigration. She is simple, unintelligent – a striking and funny contrast to intellectual Fritz: The first time Fritz sees her she is described as ‘a very young dark-haired girl’ – ‘very young’. To make it even harder, Fitzgerald stresses the fact that Sophie is not an old twelve-year-old, in the way that Shakespeare’s Juliet seems more adult than her not-yet-fourteen years Sophie is unmistakably a child. How can anyone fall in love with a twelve-year-old girl? It’s an especially impossible question post-Jimmy Savile, of course. Twenty-two-year-old Fritz falls in love with twelve-year-old Sophie von Kuhn. (I’m going to be honest and admit straight away that I’d never heard of him, but I suspect that reflects my ignorance rather than his lack of fame.) Fitzgerald gives us Novalis when he is still ‘Fritz von Hardenberg’, the eldest son of a big shambolic noble family which has lost all its wealth.

The Blue Flower – Penelope Fitzgerald’s last novel and considered by many to be her masterpiece – is about the early life of the German Romantic poet Novalis. Her unassuming genius catches you by surprise. Fitzgerald gives us perfect little stories, then – suddenly – you realise they are the product of an absolutely extraordinary mind. Her slender, potent novels are about as far away as you could imagine from all those braggy, baggy monsters which claim to be ‘the Great American novel’, or ‘the voice of our generation’, or something else ridiculously self-aggrandising. I love the modesty of her genius – the way she manages to condense a vast amount of research into a few perfectly placed sentences, or captures a character in a single revealing moment.

Penelope Fitzgerald is one of my very favourite writers.

The blue flower book