The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (1995)

The whole house is hung with washing the day Fritz's friend arrives, the year's linen steaming from every banister, and into this clamour of a great untidy German family the novel sets down its impossible fact: Friedrich von Hardenberg, the young philosopher who will become the poet Novalis, has fallen in love with Sophie von Kuhn. She is twelve. She is not clever, not musical, not pretty in any way worth recording; she plays cards and says nothing memorable, and his family receives the engagement with appalled courtesy. Penelope Fitzgerald, writing her last and finest novel in her late seventies, never once explains the love, because no one can. She assembles 1790s Saxony out of glimpses instead, chapters barely a page long, the salt-mine country and the racket of a vast household, until a whole world stands built from what she leaves out. The blue flower of Romantic longing, that unreachable ideal, turns out to be a girl who coughs and will not live long. The ache was never the flower. It was the wanting.