Following our vote last week, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower has emerged as this month’s reading group choice – just. It’s been a painfully close-run thing, with The Beginning of Spring right behind and The Bookshop close after that. “I love them all,” was a fairly typical comment. Choosing between these fine novels has clearly proved a challenge.
Since nearly all Fitzgerald’s books seem to be universally admired, I hope I’m right in assuming that those disappointed their first choice didn’t win will still enjoy The Blue Flower. It certainly sounds like an intriguing novel.
For a start, it has been showered with praise. Fitzgerald biographer Hermione Lee has called The Blue Flower her subject’s “beautiful masterpiece”. Frank Kermode wrote in a 2010 introduction to the book that it is “the finest work of this extraordinarily gifted novelist”. Novelist Andrew Miller says it is “impeccable” and when the book came out in 1995 poet and translator Michael Hoffman wrote in the New York Times that it is “hard to know where to begin to praise the book” before also declaring it a masterpiece.
This is also a novel with a fascinating, if difficult, subject: the early German Romantic philosopher Novalis and his love for a teenage girl. We’ll be able to say more about what to make of that as we read through the book.
I have a feeling there’s going to be a great deal to discuss in The Blue Flower, but let’s keep our options open and consider touching on The Beginning of Spring later on in the month. As ever, I’ll be keen to hear opinions about that and any other subjects you’d like to discuss.
To further that end, we have five copies of The Blue Flower to give away to the first five readers from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive comment in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Laura Kemp with your address (laura.kemp@theguardian.com). Be nice to her, too.
On 27 January, we’ll also be joined by the wonderful Hermione Lee for a webchat about Fitzgerald. Lee wrote Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life in 2013; “a perfect choice as Fitzgerald’s biographer” according to Philip Hensher, who credited Lee in his review for doing “a superb job, capturing an elusive personality and a complex, sometimes rather harrowing story”.
Oh, and one final word of caution: Fitzgerald often said she didn’t like to explain too much about her books for fear of insulting her readers … but since we’ve just spent a month breaking the first two rules of Fight Club, I’m hoping we can grant ourselves a certain amount of leeway.
