The Blue Flower

This novel follows the young Saxon poet and mining student Friedrich von Hardenberg, later known as Novalis, in the 1790s. Between university, salt-works training, and the circle of the Jena romantics, he meets Sophie von Kuhn, a girl of twelve in a provincial household, and conceives a love he treats as a philosophical and spiritual event. Family illness, courtship etiquette, and the gap between his exalted language and the ordinary life of the Kuhn household form the action. The blue flower of his unfinished romance appears as an image of unreachable longing. The book is a historical novel of a brief engagement, not a full life of the poet.

Quarter-bound in dark blue buckram with Modigliani paper sides, cover printed with a colour picture by James Albon. Dark blue slipcase and endpapers.