Q'S for THE BLUE FLOWER by PENELOPE FITZGERALD: Lesson 14 part 1
Ageless Creativity
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
This novel received the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Booker Prize when Fitzgerald was eighty years old. She published her first novel when she was sixty. Although this novel is brief, it is not a quick read. So get it used (she’s passed), public library or new.
Worth the journey for lovers of literature.
The Blue Flower could be called historical fiction. It’s a novel about a real person, the poet Novalis, penname for Friedrich von Hardenberg, who lived from 1772-1801.
Penelope Fitzgerald tells the fictional story of this man before he became Novalis, the poet.
Consider the questions that follow as you read — but if you choose not to read, the discussion that comes in Lesson 14 on Ageless Creativity that will inform your writing process, maybe the way it did mine, or in new way that acts as a prompt for you!
Is the fact that this is a story about a real person the key to this story? In other words, is that the source of the novel’s power?
Did the test of fact become an issue for you as you read it?
Are the facts of Friedrich von Hardenberg’s life what make this a believable and engaging story? If so, why?
What does this writer do in telling this story that has little, if anything, to do with what she could possibly have learned from studying the sources she mentions in the author’s note?
We’ll discuss this novel in my lessons for Write it! How to get started.
Table of Contents for all 19 lessons
And be sure to read Michael Mohr’s interview with Allison Landa, author of Bearded Lady and briefly me on (Re)Making Love, fully up now with lots of videos that will tickle you.
The lovely Alicia Kenworthy who writes Catalectic will appear as guest here.
Write me at marytabor@substack.com with questions.
To find out more about what I’m doing with “Only connect …”, go here: https://marytabor.substack.com/about
Do check out Young Men and Fire
I have free writes for you. Take a look. After this preview, that’ll cost you $5 to subscribe for a month and participate in our Starting Late conversation about prize winning authors who began when older: Ageless Creativity.
So time to go paid, if you haven’t already, and join us!
It’s never too late to tell your story.
Click ➡️ Lesson 14: part two of Ageless Creativity Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower
Table of Contents for all 19 lessons
Love always,
Great! 'Starting Late' is a terrific topic. There's a lot of conventional wisdom that assumes that you have really take in something very early to be good at it - and yet, there's the practical refutation of a ton of great artists who started very late in life. It's a very rich subject to try to figure out what some of the dynamics are of this; and why the culture tends to be so misguided in its understanding of how creativity functions.
80!! That’s incredible. Makes we strangely think of Bukowski, who didn’t publish his first novel until he was fifty. Sounds like an interesting read!