The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
An astonishing book . . . Fitzgerald s greatest triumph. New York Times Book ReviewThe Blue Flower is set in the age of Goethe, in the small towns and great universities of late eighteenth-century Germany. It tells the true story of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a passionate, impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the Romantic poet Novalis. Fritz seeks his father s permission to wed his heart's heart, his spirit's guide a plain, simple child named Sophie von Kuhn. It is an attachment that shocks his family and friends. Their brilliant young Fritz, betrothed to a twelve-year-old dullard? How can this be?
The irrationality of love, the transfiguration of the commonplace, the clarity of purpose that comes with knowing one s own fate these are the themes of this beguiling novel, themes treated with a mix of wit, grace, and mischievous humor unique to the art of Penelope Fitzgerald.
An extraordinary imagining . . . an original masterpiece. Hermione Lee, Financial Times
PENELOPE FITZGERALD (1916 2000) was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction for The Blue Flower, the Booker Prize for Offshore, and three of her novels The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, and The Beginning of Spring were short-listed for the Booker Prize.
Throughout the last two decades, PENELOPE FITZGERALD has written a number of little books that have received enormous popular and critical praise. Her novels have sold over 300,000 copies, and portraits of her life have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Her work Offshore received the Booker Prize in 1979, and her novel The Blue Flower won the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1998. Despite the fact that Fitzgerald began her writing career in her 60s, her work was recognized as the strongest argument... for a late-career publishing debut (New York Times Book Review).
She told the New York Times Magazine, I might have written books in all that time and I didn't. I believe that you can write at any point in your life. Dinitia Smith quoted Penelope Fitzgerald from 1998 in her New York Times obituary on May 3, 2000, saying, I have remained faithful to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be vanquished, the vulnerabilities of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and squandered opportunities, which I have done my best to present as comedy, because how else can we bear it?
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780395859971 |
| ISBN 10 | 0395859972 |
| Title | The Blue Flower |
| Author | Penelope Fitzgerald |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
| Year published | 1997-04-15 |
| Number of pages | 225 |
| Prizes | Winner of National Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction) 1997 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |