Madame Bovary (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Gustave Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen, France, to Achille Cleophas (a physician) and Caroline (Fleuriot) Flaubert. Flaubert lived with his family in an apartment in the hospital where his father served as chief surgeon and professor. Stirling Haig, in his article on Flaubert in Dictionary of Literary Biography, suggests that Flaubert, who was exposed to pain and suffering at the hospital throughout his childhood, developed a "gloomy perspective on life and death" that he would later weave into the fabric of his works.

Flaubert began writing in his childhood. By 1832, he had completed two texts: the serious-minded Eloge de Corneille (Tribute to Pierre Corneille, the seventeenth-century playwright) and the juvenile La Belle Explication de la Fameuse Constipation (The Fine Explanation of the Famous Constipation). While a student at the Collège Royal de Rouen, Flaubert devoured the classics and staged plays by Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molière. He started writing historical fiction (for school assignments) and psychological mysteries, elements of which foreshadow the characterizations in his novels.

After graduation, Flaubert entered law school in Paris, prodded by his parents. In 1844, he had what was most likely an episode of epilepsy. As a result, he gave up the law and turned to a literary career. The best of his early work, the novel Novembre (1885; translated [1934] as November) is a fictional account of Flaubert's sexual relationship with an older woman he had met in 1836 in Trouville.

Flaubert worked on his most famous and celebrated novel, Madame Bovary, from September 1851 until April 1856. The novel gained notoriety after the French government charged Flaubert with obscenity and stopped its publication, determining the work to be a challenge to moral decency. The charges and the ban, however, were soon dropped, and Madame Bovary would become one of the most celebrated novels of the nineteenth century. Ironically, Flaubert came to resent the attention paid to the novel, especially since, as a result, few of his other works received the consideration he thought they deserved. Yet, through his body of work, Flaubert has come to be regarded as one of the finest novelists of the nineteenth century. Flaubert died on May 8, 1880, in Croisset, France, ending a long and successful literary career.