The Blue Flower

20. THE NATURE OF DESIRE (#litres_trial_promo)

21. SNOW (#litres_trial_promo)

22. NOW LET ME GET TO KNOW HER (#litres_trial_promo)

23. I CAN’T COMPREHEND HER (#litres_trial_promo)

24. THE BROTHERS (#litres_trial_promo)

25. CHRISTMAS AT WEISSENFELS (#litres_trial_promo)

26. THE MANDELSLOH (#litres_trial_promo)

27. ERASMUS CALLS ON KAROLINE JUST (#litres_trial_promo)

28. FROM SOPHIE’S DIARY, 1795 (#litres_trial_promo)

29. A SECOND READING (#litres_trial_promo)

30. SOPHIE’S LIKENESS (#litres_trial_promo)

31. I COULD NOT PAINT HER (#litres_trial_promo)

32. THE WAY LEADS INWARDS (#litres_trial_promo)

33. AT JENA (#litres_trial_promo)

34. THE GARDEN-HOUSE (#litres_trial_promo)

35. SOPHIE IS COLD THROUGH AND THROUGH (#litres_trial_promo)

36. DR HOFRAT EBHARD (#litres_trial_promo)

37. WHAT IS PAIN? (#litres_trial_promo)

38. KAROLINE AT GRüNINGEN (#litres_trial_promo)

39. THE QUARREL (#litres_trial_promo)

40. HOW TO RUN A SALT MINE (#litres_trial_promo)

41. SOPHIE AT FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

42. THE FREIFRAU IN THE GARDEN (#litres_trial_promo)

43. THE ENGAGEMENT PARTY (#litres_trial_promo)

44. THE INTENDED (#litres_trial_promo)

45. SHE MUST GO TO JENA (#litres_trial_promo)

46. VISITORS (#litres_trial_promo)

47. HOW PROFESSOR STARK MANAGED (#litres_trial_promo)

48. TO SCHLÖBEN (#litres_trial_promo)

49. AT THE ROSE (#litres_trial_promo)

50. A DREAM (#litres_trial_promo)

51. AUTUMN 1796 (#litres_trial_promo)

52. ERASMUS IS OF SERVICE (#litres_trial_promo)

53. A VISIT TO MAGISTER KEGEL (#litres_trial_promo)

54. ALGEBRA, LIKE LAUDANUM, DEADENS PAIN (#litres_trial_promo)

55. MAGISTER KEGEL’S LESSON (#litres_trial_promo)

AFTERWORD (#litres_trial_promo)

AUTHOR’S NOTE (#litres_trial_promo)

BY THE SAME AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)

Penelope Fitzgerald (#ulink_d6272331-5366-50fb-90ea-b189a4c2f146)

Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor (#ulink_d6272331-5366-50fb-90ea-b189a4c2f146)

When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.

Outsiders in literature were close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humour.

She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been short listed for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life – working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school – or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity – she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.

After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have provided introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.

Introduction (#ulink_4a8632a4-e5b2-5907-ad8f-ef5f8b5ffc5b)

Penelope Fitzgerald, in an all-too-short autobiographical piece entitled ‘Curriculum Vitae’, writes that she could ‘honestly say that I never shell peas in summer without thinking of Ruskin and of my grandfather’. That grandfather, like the one on her father’s side, was a bishop who ‘had started out with next to nothing’. He fell under the influence of Ruskin, who would describe, ‘with keenest relish’, the joy of shelling peas – ‘the pop which assures one of a successful start, the fresh colour and scent of the juicy row within, and the pleasure of skilfully scooping the bouncing peas with one’s thumb into the vessel by one’s side’.