Gustave Flaubert

The French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was one of the most important forces in creating the modern novel as a conscious art form and in launching, much against his will, the realistic school in France.

Gustave Flaubert was born on Dec. 12, 1821, in Rouen. Rouen's medieval charm, the bustle of its business (which revolted him), and the comfortable bourgeois ease that flowed from his father's position as chief surgeon at the municipal hospital marked the sensitive child. Fearing his father, he found outlets for his overflowing affections in his mother and younger sister. His sister died in childbirth when Flaubert was 24, but his mother lived (usually with him) until his fiftieth year. He was tied to her by bonds of love and exasperation, which he never fully understood.

As an adolescent of 15, Flaubert fell platonically in love with an older married woman, Elisa Schlésinger, and remembered her ever after as a pure and unsullied love. A few years later he toyed briefly with the idea of marriage but never again seriously considered it. The young man was sent to Paris to study law, where his desultory efforts were largely unsuccessful. He had easy access to what he called "the bitter poetry of prostitution," and this led to venereal disease, from which he never recovered. His attitudes toward women were colored by these experiences, and the subject of love became an obsessive focal issue in his works. He early linked sexuality to religion, which he felt was a similar longing for certainty always frustrated by doubt. Both areas brought him notions of doom, death, and annihilation.

In 1845 Flaubert had his first attack of temporal-lobe epilepsy. He was helplessly crippled by his seizures, which became hideous terror for him and recurred at intervals throughout his life. In 1846 he had to face the deaths of his father and his beloved sister. He abandoned his legal studies, since any emotional excitement brought on an attack of his malady. He must, he felt, become an observer of life and not a participant in it; thereafter he gave himself fully only to his writing. He did have love affairs, but they were never central to his life; most important were his stormy affairs with the poet Louise Colet in 1846-1847 and again in 1851-1854 and his affectionate relationship with Juliet Herbert, the governess of his niece, which began in the mid-1850s and lasted to the end of his life.

In literature alone Flaubert found no unbearable conflict, for he had been slowly evolving away from his childhood romantic ideal of the writer caught up in wild emotion as he wrote. Even before his illness he was moving toward a concept of writing as "emotion recollected in tranquility," an esthetic of detachment easily concording with his physical state. It allowed quiet consideration of style, which he felt as essential to prose as it had long been considered to poetry. After several false starts he turned to writing TheTemptation of Saint Anthony, the story of the desert hermit of Egypt, which was a convenient focus for his concerns with religion and sexuality and for giving scope to his enjoyment of erudite research. He completed the first version in 1849, but unfortunately it proved unpublishable. This was a bitter blow, and during the next 25 years he intermittently revised the work.

After this failure Flaubert left immediately for a longplanned 20-month journey through the eastern Mediterranean, accompanied by his lifelong friend Maxime Du Camp. He had studied Egypt and the Holy Land for Saint Anthony, and their familiarity upon first sight confirmed his view that art could conjure up reality. He returned via Greece and Italy, the classical lands whose esthetic, with its insistence on simplicity, control, and serenity, formed a further focus in his work.

Madame Bovary

In 1851 Flaubert embarked upon Madame Bovary, on which he worked until 1856. It was published in 1857 and created a storm; Flaubert in fact was unsuccessfully tried on the charge of contributing to public depravity. In addition to satirizing the provincial bourgeoisie, this work tells of Emma Bovary, who as a girl attends a convent school where she acquires romantic notions of a lover who will live for her alone. She marries a good but simple doctor, Charles Bovary, who adores her but does not understand her romantic fantasies, and she then has two love affairs. When, at the end, she finds her dream world in shreds about her, she prefers death to accepting a world not consonant with her fantasies and commits suicide.

At a more profound level the book is the profession of faith of an author who had outgrown romanticism and knew its premises were false. The man of whom Emma dreamed could not exist; the only man who would tell her what she wished sought only an easy seduction. She was foredoomed from the moment she adopted romantic fantasies in the convent.

Madame Bovary can also be read as Flaubert's view of modern woman, who has been perverted by society to shallow or false ideals and thus cannot follow her own nature to its true fulfillment in real love, which would combine in one transcendent experience the fullest physical experiences with the richest spiritual ones. These concepts, coupled with Emma's death, embody Flaubert's principal themes: sexuality, religion, and annihilation. The book is a masterpiece because of these underlying concerns and Flaubert's analysis, and because of his success in giving them form in his novel.

Madame Bovary displayed a new technique for writing ironic novels which writers were to imitate for many generations. Flaubert's doctrines may be readily summarized. He believed writers must write of the observed, actual facts; his documentation became legendary. To this extent he partook of the scientism of his period. He wished the writer to be, like the scientist, objective, impartial, impersonal, and impassive. But while the scientist generalizes his truths into a law of nature, Flaubert asked the writer to generalize his observations into an ideal, a type, whose dynamic power becomes apparent through the artistry of its presentation. Finally, Flaubert was a convinced Platonist who accepted the Socratic dictum that the True, the Beautiful, and the Good are one. If the writer presented the True through the Beautiful, his work would also be morally good.

The publication of Madame Bovary made Flaubert a celebrity. A floundering school of French writers who called themselves realists (markedly inferior to their later American counterparts) imitated Flaubert's use of careful documentation and a rather commonplace subject and proclaimed him their master. In Paris he came to know most of the important people of his day: members of the imperial court, the Goncourt brothers, George Sand, to whom he became devoted, and later the younger men such as Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Ivan Turgenev. He withdrew, however, each spring to Croisset, a village near Rouen.

Flaubert's next work, Salammbô (1862), recounted the revolt of the mercenaries against Carthage in the 3d century B.C. In it he gave free rein to his penchant for archeological documentation and his delight in the ancient world. Unfortunately the novel is tedious and repetitious, and few readers have been moved by this mythological account of the fusion of sexuality with religion and their joint culmination in death and annihilation. Flaubert's scrupulously accurate reconstruction of antiquity, however, did influence later historical novels.

A Sentimental Education

In 1864 Flaubert started work on A Sentimental Education, which was published in 1869. His great Parisian novel, this work is the equal of Madame Bovary although less popular. It presents a satiric panorama of Flaubert's generation. The weak, cowardly hero, Frédéric Moreau, experiences early adoration for an older married woman, Marie Arnoux. This situation is drawn from Flaubert's own life, and Marie Arnoux is one of his greatest creations. Frédéric tries many careers and penetrates most of the important milieus of France at the mid-century. Each new episode is a new hope for him; each ends in disillusionment. "A symphony in gray," Flaubert's Sentimental Education suggests that unfulfilled dreams are always superior to reality, which annihilates them. Henry James, James Joyce, and the "new novel" in France since World War II all owe something to it.

The end of the 1860s and the start of the 1870s were a period of disasters for Flaubert. He was stunned by the deaths of many of his closest friends. The minor poet and dramatist Louis Bouilhet had been his constant counselor and confidant for 20 years, and his death in 1869 was an irreparable loss. Flaubert also mourned the deaths of the critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1869) and the writer Théophile Gautier (1872). In 1872 he lost his mother, the culminating blow.

Flaubert's despair shows in his next work, a revision (the third) of his earlier Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874). It summarizes his lifelong preoccupation with religion and proposes the doctrines of his friend Ernest Renan that all religions are equally true and equally false, equally beautiful and equally a source of anguished nostalgia since they all must perish. Religion and annihilation thus inform the book; sexuality, too, leads to the same end.

Three Tales

Flaubert had brought up the orphaned niece of his beloved sister. His niece met financial disaster in 1875, and he sacrificed his fortune in a vain attempt to stave off her ruin. Impoverished, unable to help her further yet despairing over both their plights, he turned with a humility he had never known before to the preparation of his Three Tales (1877). The first two of these are among the best 19th century French short stories.

"A Simple Heart" recounts the selfless devotion of a servant, Félicité, through a lifetime of service. The second, a retelling of the medieval "Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller," shows the saint killing his father and mother and making atonement during the rest of his life. Neither tale is ironic; each conveys a symbolic message. The third tale, "Hérodias," is less successful but states the message directly through John the Baptist, who gladly accepts his fate: for the Messiah to come, he, the predecessor, must willingly die. Félicité and St. Julian had also learned to put the welfare of others above their own and to seek happiness only in the fullness of love. It was the wisdom Flaubert had learned in his own sacrifices for his niece.

Flaubert began his uncompleted last work, Bouvard and Pécuchet, before the financial crisis of his niece; he continued it after he had finished the Three Tales. He thought of it as inaugurating a new genre, the philosophical novel; it has been the subject of much dispute. Two rather simple copy clerks come into an inheritance, retire to the country, and study one subject after another, each time with renewed excitement and hopefulness and each time ending in disaster. A Sentimental Education had reviewed all of contemporary society and found it hollow; all of religion had been examined in Saint Anthony and had been found wanting; so in Bouvard and Pécuchet, all knowledge is scrutinized and found futile. Much in Bouvard and Pécuchet is great satire; much is hilarious; much becomes deeply sad; but some of it has been deemed tedious. And in the absence of its second half, it is not absolutely clear what Flaubert intended to suggest. It was, however, a seminal work for James Joyce.

On May 8, 1880, Flaubert was struck down by a brain hemorrhage after having spent his last years in anguish.

Further Reading

The most comprehensive general study of Flaubert's life and works is Benjamin F. Bart, Flaubert (1967). A fine study of his early life through the publication of Madame Bovary is Enid Starkie, Flaubert: The Making of the Master (1967). The best study of Flaubert's writings is Victor H. Brombert, The Novels of Flaubert: A Study of Themes and Techniques (1966). Useful essays on the whole of Flaubert's works are in Raymond D. Giraud, Flaubert: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Benjamin F. Bart (1964). A representative sampling of critical opinion on Flaubert's first novel is included in Benjamin F. Bart, ed., "Madame Bovary" and the Critics (1966).

Additional Sources

Troyat, Henri, Flaubert, New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1992.

Lottman, Herbert R., Flaubert: a biography, Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.

(click to enlarge)
Gustave Flaubert, detail of a drawing by E.F. von Liphart, 1880; in the Bibliothèque … (credit: Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Municipale, Rouen; photograph, Ellebe)

(born Dec. 12, 1821, Rouen, France — died May 8, 1880, Croisset) French novelist. Flaubert abandoned law studies at age 22 for a life of writing. His masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1857), a sharply realistic portrayal of provincial bourgeois boredom and adultery, led to his trial (and narrow acquittal) on charges of immorality. His other novels include the exotic Salammbô (1862), set in ancient Carthage; A Sentimental Education (1869), a classic bildungsroman of disillusionment in a time of social and political change; and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), notable for its depiction of spiritual torment. Trois Contes (1877) contains three novellas set in the ancient, medieval, and contemporary periods. Renowned for his lapidary style, he is regarded as the foremost exponent of French realism.

For more information on Gustave Flaubert, visit Britannica.com.

Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80). French novelist, a major figure of world literature. Henry James called him the ‘writer's writer’ in recognition of his obsession with literary form, and Flaubert has been admired by many creative writers. He has also intrigued literary critics of every persuasion.

He grew up in accommodation attached to a hospital in Rouen, where his father was a well-known surgeon. He enjoyed his schoolwork, especially history, and developed a precocious literary talent from around the age of 14. His very early works repay study for their insight into Flaubert's psychology, and for their close thematic links with the mature works. Short stories such as ‘Un parfum à sentir’, ‘La Peste à Florence’, and ‘Bibliomanie’ (1838), or ‘Quidquid volueris’ and ‘Passion et vertu’ (1837), were followed by a romantic first-person confession, Mémoires d'un fou (1838), and a philosophical drama, Smarh (1839). Expelled from his lycée in 1839, he passed his baccalauréat by private study, and enrolled reluctantly as a law student in Paris. There he completed Novembre (1842), a pessimistic confession which was more sophisticated than Mémoires d'un fou, switching (Werther-like) from first to third person, and including an intercalated episode with Marie, a prostitute who initiates him sexually before recounting her own mirror-image story.

The writing of the first L'Éducation sentimentale (which shares only its title with the 1869 novel) was interrupted by the event that was to shape the rest of Flaubert's life. In January 1844 he suffered a major epileptic fit and entered a long period of recurrent illness. In his large-scale study of Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille, Sartre suggests that his epilepsy was hysterical, representing a radical option for failure and passivity, allowing him to escape the demands of the adult world and to accede, via the condition of rentier, to the status of an artist. Certainly the plot of L'Éducation, finished in 1845, reveals a shift of interest from the worldly Henry to Jules, an introspective would-be artist whose life to date has been a failure. And certainly it was agreed that Flaubert should give up the legal studies which he hated (he had failed his second-year examination in 1843). He adapted readily enough to life at Croisset, the house outside Rouen which his father purchased for the benefit of his son's health, and which was to be his home and writing-base for the rest of his life. The household was an unusual one, for Flaubert's father and sister both died early in 1846, leaving just Flaubert, his mother, and his baby niece Caroline, who was brought up by his mother.

In July 1846 Flaubert met Louise Colet in Paris; the first phase of their intense but famously difficult relationship lasted nearly two years. Flaubert was unwilling to spend much time with her, despite the passion expressed in their almost non-stop correspondence. In 1847 he found time to spend three months on a walking holiday in Brittany with Maxime du Camp. The two friends collaborated on a set of literary travel notes, Par les champs et par les grèves, writing alternate chapters. The year 1848 was marked less by the Revolution and its aftermath than by the death of a close boyhood friend, Alfred Le Poittevin, whose speculative, metaphysical bent no doubt influenced Flaubert's La Tentation de saint Antoine. On its completion in 1849 Flaubert accompanied Du Camp on an 18-month expedition to Egypt and the Middle East, of which he produced a rich account in his letters and travel notes, and during which he seems to have clarified his aesthetic principles.

Flaubert's mature period can be seen to start here. He returned with a new sense of purpose, and a willingness to embark upon his first novel for publication. This was to be Madame Bovary, on which he worked for five years. Its early period of composition is admirably recorded in his correspondence with Louise Colet, with whom he renewed relations (albeit excessively spaced out), until finally breaking with her in 1854. Flaubert was acquitted in 1857 of the criminal charge of publishing a morally offensive book; the trial ensured the success of Madame Bovary, and Flaubert, for the first time, became a well-known writer. From this time on he seems to have accommodated himself happily to Second Empire society. He had a close friend and literary advisor in Louis Bouilhet, he corresponded and occasionally socialized with many of the literary and artistic figures of the day (Sainte-Beuve, the Goncourt brothers, Gautier, and Renan), and after the successful publication of Salammbô in 1862 he formed a friendship with the Princesse Mathilde, cousin of the emperor. He was also close to George Sand, despite their differing views on literature.

His life went less well from 1869. He was disappointed by the reception of L'Éducation sentimentale, devastated by the death of Bouilhet, and experienced the collapse of the Empire in 1870 as the end of the world in which he felt at home. He despised both Prussians and communards. The early 1870s were marked by other bereavements: close friends, and above all his mother in 1872. Financial problems followed from the sale of property in 1875 (to rescue his niece's husband from bankruptcy), and by 1879 he was obliged to accept a small pension organized for him by his friends. However, he was befriended by a younger generation of writers in the late 1870s, published Trois contes in 1877, and had almost completed the first volume of Bouvard et Pécuchet when he died suddenly in May 1880.

Flaubert was less of a hermit than legend has it. Recent scholarship has interestingly revealed the existence of a long-standing relationship with Juliette Herbert, his niece's English governess, and over the years he clearly had many good friends. He pretended to hate everybody, and especially the French bourgeoisie, but he seems to have hated the working classes far more. His misanthropy (real or insincere), his obsession with la bêtise and with the idées reçues of the bourgeois world-view, the noisy humour that seems to have marked his social persona, are doubtless signs of an uneasy assumption of his own class position as a provincial rentier. For despite his pretence of disassociating his literature from ideological positions, the content of Flaubert's mature works, as much as their over-wrought language, is marked by an extraordinary tension. This finds its concrete form in an ironic tone and narrative attitude which are notoriously difficult to place.

[Diana Knight]

Bibliography

• J.-P. Sartre, L'Idiot de la famille, 3 vols. (1971-2)
• J. Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (1974)
• D. Knight, Flaubert's Characters: The Language of Illusion (1985)

Quotes:

"Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times."

"Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in."

"All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry."

"Read in order to live."

"The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments."

Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Born	12 December 1821(1821-12-12) Rouen, France
Died	8 May 1880 (aged 58) Rouen, France
Occupation	Novelist, playwright
Nationality	French
Genres	Fictional prose
Literary movement	Realism, Romanticism
Influences Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Francois Chateaubriand
Influenced Anton Chekhov, Jean Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Ezra Pound, Guy de Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Emile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, Mario Vargas Llosa, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Michael Chabon, Guram Dochanashvili, Grigol Robakidze, George Orwell, William H. Gass

Gustave Flaubert (French pronunciation: [ɡystaːv flobɛːʁ]) (December 12, 1821 – May 8, 1880) was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.

Contents 1 Life 1.1 Early life and education 1.2 Personal life 1.3 Writing career 2 Work and legacy 3 Bibliography 3.1 Major works 3.2 Correspondence (in English) 3.3 Biographical and other related publications 4 References 5 External links

Life

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Portrait by Eugène Giraud.

Early life and education

Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen, Seine-Maritime, in the Haute-Normandie region of France. He was the second son of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert (1784–1846), a surgeon, and Anne Justine Caroline (née Fleuriot) (1793–1872). He began writing at an early age, as early as eight according to some sources.^[specify] He was educated in his native city and did not leave it until 1840, when he went to Paris to study law.

In Paris, he was an indifferent student and found the city distasteful. He made a few acquaintances, including Victor Hugo. Towards the close of 1840, he travelled in the Pyrenees and Corsica. In 1846, after an attack of epilepsy, he left Paris and abandoned the study of law.

Personal life

From 1846 to 1854, Flaubert had a relationship with the poet Louise Colet (his letters to her survive). After leaving Paris, Flaubert returned to Croisset, near the Seine, close to Rouen, and lived with his mother in their home for the rest of his life; with occasional visits to Paris and England, where he apparently had a mistress. Flaubert never married. According to his biographer Émile Faguet, his affair with Louise Colet was his only serious romantic relationship. He sometimes visited prostitutes.^[1] Eventually, the end of his affair with Louise Colet led Flaubert to lose interest in romance and seek platonic companionship, particularly with other writers.

With his lifelong friend Maxime du Camp, he traveled in Brittany in 1846. In 1849-1850 he went on a long journey to the Middle East, visiting Greece and Egypt. In Beirut he contracted syphilis. He spent five weeks in Constantinople in 1850. He visited Carthage in 1858 to conduct research for his novel Salammbô.

Flaubert was a tireless worker and often complained in his letters to friends about the strenuous nature of his work. He was close to his niece, Caroline Commanville, and had a close friendship and correspondence with George Sand. He occasionally visited Parisian acquaintances, including Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Ivan Turgenev, and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt.

The 1870s were difficult. Prussian soldiers occupied his house during the War of 1870, and in 1872, his mother died. After her death, he fell into financial straits. Flaubert suffered from venereal diseases most of his life. His health declined and he died at Croisset of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1880 at the age of 58. He was buried in the family vault in the cemetery of Rouen. A monument to him by Henri Chapu was unveiled at the museum of Rouen.

Writing career

In September 1849, Flaubert completed the first version of a novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. He read the novel aloud to Louis Bouilhet and Maxime du Camp over the course of four days, not allowing them to interrupt or give any opinions. At the end of the reading, his friends told him to throw the manuscript in the fire, suggesting instead that he focus on day to day life rather than on fantastic subjects.

In 1850, after returning from Egypt, Flaubert began work on Madame Bovary. The novel, which took five years to write, was serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1856. The government brought an action against the publisher and author on the charge of immorality, which was heard during the following year, but both were acquitted. When Madame Bovary appeared in book form, it met with a warm reception.

In 1858, Flaubert traveled to Carthage to gather material for his next novel, Salammbô. The novel was completed in 1862 after four years of work.

Drawing on his childhood experiences, Flaubert next wrote L'Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education), an effort that took seven years. L'Éducation sentimentale, his last complete novel, was published in 1869.

He wrote an unsuccessful drama, Le Candidat, and published a reworked version of La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, portions of which had been published as early as 1857. He devoted much of his time to an ongoing project, Les Deux Cloportes (The Two Woodlice), which later became Bouvard et Pécuchet, breaking from the obsessive project only to write the Three Tales in 1877. This book comprised three stories: Un Cœur simple (A Simple Heart), La Légende de Saint-Julien l'Hospitalier (The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller), and Hérodias (Herodias). After the publication of the stories, he spent the remainder of his life toiling on the unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet, which was posthumously printed in 1881. It was a grand satire on the futility of human knowledge and the ubiquity of mediocrity. He believed the work to be his masterpiece, though the posthumous version received lukewarm reviews. Flaubert was a prolific letter writer, and his letters have been collected in several publications.

Work and legacy

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Gustave Flaubert

More than perhaps any other writer, not only of France, but of modern Europe, Flaubert scrupulously avoids the inexact, the abstract, the vaguely inapt expression which is the bane of ordinary methods of composition. As a writer, Flaubert was nearly equal parts romantic, realist, and pure stylist. Hence, members of various schools, especially realists and formalists, have traced their origins to his work. The exactitude with which he adapts his expressions to his purpose can be seen in all parts of his work, especially in the portraits he draws of the figures in his principal romances. The degree to which Flaubert's fame has extended since his death presents an interesting chapter of literary history in itself. He is also accredited with spreading the popularity of the colour Tuscany Cypress, a colour often mentioned in his chef-d'oeuvre Madame Bovary.

Flaubert was fastidious in his devotion to finding the right word ("le mot juste"), and his mode of composition reflected that. He worked in sullen solitude - sometimes occupying a week in the completion of one page - never satisfied with what he had composed, violently tormenting his brain for the best turn of a phrase, the final adjective. His private letters indeed show that he was not one of those to whom correct, flowing language came naturally. His style was achieved through the unceasing sweat of his brow. Flaubert’s just reward, then, is that many critics consider his best works to be exemplary models of style.

“	Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring; it all begins again with him. There really is time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling of brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert.	”
—Critic James Wood in How Fiction Works (2008)[2]

Flaubert's lean and precise writing style has had a large influence on 20th century writers such as Franz Kafka through to J.M Coetzee. As Vladimir Nabokov discussed in his famous lecture series:

The greatest literary influence upon Kafka was Flaubert's. Flaubert who loathed pretty-pretty prose would have applauded Kafka's attitude towards his tool. Kafka liked to draw his terms from the language of law and science, giving them a kind of ironic precision, with no intrusion of the author's private sentiments; this was exactly Flaubert's method through which he achieved a singular poetic effect.

This painstaking style of writing is also evident when one compares Flaubert’s output over a lifetime to that of his peers (see, for example Balzac or Zola). Flaubert published much less prolifically than was the norm for his time and never got near the pace of a novel a year, as his peers often achieved during their peaks of activity. The legacy of his work habits can best be described, therefore, as paving the way towards a slower and more inspective manner of writing.

The publication of Madame Bovary in 1856 was followed by more scandal than admiration; it was not understood at first that this novel was the beginning of something new: the scrupulously truthful portraiture of life. Gradually, this aspect of his genius was accepted, and it began to crowd out all others. At the time of his death he was widely regarded as the most influential French Realist. Under this aspect Flaubert exercised an extraordinary influence over Guy de Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, and Zola. Even after the decline of the Realist school, Flaubert did not lose prestige in the literary community; he continues to appeal to other writers because of his deep commitment to aesthetic principles, his devotion to style, and his indefatigable pursuit of the perfect expression.

He can be said to have made cynicism into an art form, as evinced by this observation from 1846:

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

His Œuvres Complètes (8 vols., 1885) were printed from the original manuscripts, and included, besides the works mentioned already, the two plays, Le Candidat and Le Château des cœurs. Another edition (10 vols.) appeared in 1873–1885. Flaubert's correspondence with George Sand was published in 1884 with an introduction by Guy de Maupassant.

He has been admired or written about by almost every major literary personality of the 20th century, including philosophers and sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Paul Sartre whose partially psychoanalytic portrait of Flaubert in The Family Idiot was published in 1971. Georges Perec named Sentimental Education as one of his favourite novels. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa is another great admirer of Flaubert. Apart from Perpetual Orgy, which is solely devoted to Flaubert's art, one can find lucid discussions in Vargas Llosa's recently published Letters to a Young Novelist.

Bibliography

Major works

French literature
By category
French literary history
Medieval 16th century · 17th century 18th century · 19th century 20th century · Contemporary
French writers
Chronological list Writers by category Novelists · Playwrights Poets · Essayists Short story writers
France portal
Literature portal This box: view • talk • edit

• Mémoires d’un fou (1838) (tr. Memoirs of a Madman)
• Madame Bovary (1857)
• Salammbô (1862)
• L'Éducation sentimentale (1869) (tr. Sentimental Education)
• La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874) (tr. The Temptation of Saint Anthony)
• Trois contes (1877) (tr. Three Tales) (More short stories published in "Early Writings": ISBN 0-8032-1982-2)
• Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881, posthumously published)
• Dictionnaire des idées reçues (1911, posthumously published, tr. Dictionary of Received Ideas)
• November (written, 1842)
• a Simple Heart
• Herodias

Correspondence (in English)

• Selections:
  • Selected Letters (ed. Francis Steegmuller, 1953, 2001)
  • Selected Letters (ed. Geoffrey Wall, 1997)
• Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour (1972) ISBN 9780140435825
• Flaubert and Turgenev, a Friendship in Letters: The Complete Correspondence (ed. Barbara Beaumont, 1985)
• Correspondence with George Sand:
  • The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters, translated by Aimée G. Leffingwel McKenzie (A.L. McKensie), introduced by Stuart Sherman (1921), available at the Gutenberg website as E-text N° 5115
  • Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence (1993)

Biographical and other related publications

• Brown, Frederick, Flaubert: A Biography, Little, Brown; 2006. ISBN 0-316-11878-8
• Hennequin, Émile, Quelques écrivains français Flaubert, Zola, Hugo, Goncourt, Huysmans, etc., available at the Gutenberg website as E-text N° 12289
• Barnes, Julian, Flaubert's Parrot, ISBN 0-330-28976-4
• Steegmuller, Francis, Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait, Viking Press; 1939.
• Tooke, Adrianne, Flaubert and the Pictorial Arts: From Image to Text, Oxford University Press; 2000. ISBN 0-19-815918-8
• Wall, Geoffrey, Flaubert: A Life, Faber and Faber; 2001. ISBN 0-571-21239-5
• Various authors, The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert, available at the Gutenberg website as E-text N° 10666.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volumes 1-5. University Of Chicago Press, 1987.
• Patton, Susannah, A Journey into Flaubert's Normandy, Roaring Forties Press, 2007. ISBN 0-9766706-8-2

References

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

1. ^ Flaubert, Gustave (2005). The desert and the dancing girls. Penguin books. p. 10-12. ISBN 0-141-02223-X. 
2. ^ Wood, James (2008). How Fiction Works. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 29. ISBN 0-374-17340-0. 

External links

Online texts

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Gustave Flaubert

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Gustave Flaubert

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Gustave Flaubert

• French Audiobook (mp3): La femme du monde (taken from Flaubert's early works)
• Works by Gustave Flaubert at Project Gutenberg
• Flaubert's works: text, concordances and frequency list
• (French) Gustave Flaubert, his work in audio version

More links

• Overview from kirjasto.sci.fi
• site of the Centre Flaubert at Rouen
• Multilingual research links from fjvenezia.com
• Flaubert entry at the Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
• Bibliomania page
• A comprehensive site in French at perso.wanadoo.fr
• Flaubert 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge, with suggestions for further reading
• Flaubert works (HTML/PDF), media & interactive timeline from mootnotes.com
• Gustave Flaubert at Find a Grave

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