Set during the height of German Romanticism, former Booker Prize winner Penelope Fitzgerald's 1995 novel The Blue Flower, recently published for the first time in America, portrays true events in the life of Friedrich von Hardenberg, best known for his poetic work under the name Novalis. The book follows a young Hardenberg through his college career, in which he studies under the likes of Fichte and Friedrich Schlegel—thinkers intellectually in tune with the revolutionary spirit of the age—and, most importantly, falls instantly in love with Sophie von Kühn, a 12-year-old girl. That Kühn is the overwhelmingly powerful object of Hardenberg's desire while appearing to be wholly unspectacular and unsuitable to all others is a none-too-subtle (but effective) metaphor for the new, untested pursuits of the era in an otherwise subtle book. Fitzgerald's restrained style provides an ideal contrast to the high passions of her subject, and hardly gets in the way of the novel being as engaging emotionally as it is intellectually. Hardenberg's passion is ridiculous, of course, but ridiculous in a way made recognizable to anyone who has ever been in the grips of passion; The Blue Flower is not only historically savvy, but it makes that passion seem at once pitiable and as delicate and impossible as the object from which the novel takes its name.