The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1857-1880 (Vol. 2)

About this book

Having been acquitted of the charge of outrage of public morals and religion brought against him upon the publication Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert found himself in 1857 a celebrity and one of the most admired literary men of his day. Francis Steegmullers volume of Flauberts letters from the years culminating in that triumph was hailed by the New York Times as brilliantly edited and annotateda splendid intimate account of the development of a writer who changed the nature of the novel. It went on to garner widespread critical acclaim and to win an American Book Award for Translation. Now in the second volume we see Flaubert in the years of his famethe years in which he wrote Salammb Lducation sentimentale The Temptation of Saint Anthony Three Tales and the unfinished Bouvard and Pecuchet. In writing the novels Flaubert followed his precept An author in his book must be like God in the universe present everywhere and visible nowhere but in these letters of his maturity he gives full scope to his feelings and expresses forceful opinions on matters public and private. We see Flaubert traveling to Tunisia to document the exotic Salammb then calling on his own memories and those of his friends to bring to life the Revolution of 1848 and the loves of his hero Frederic Moreau in the pages of Lducation sentimentale which many today consider his greatest novel. Flaubert is taken up by the Second Empire Court of Napoleon III and Eugenie and becomes a lifelong friend of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte. But the most powerful feminine presence in this volume is the warm sympathetic George Sand with whom he maintains a fascinating correspondence for more than ten years. This dialogue on life letters and politics between the two troubadours as they called themselves reveals both of them at their idiosyncratic best. The deaths of Flauberts mother of his closest friend and mentor Louis Bouilhet and of Thophile Gautier Sainte-Beuve and other intimates and Flauberts financial ruin at the hands of his beloved niece Caroline and her rapacious husband make a somber story of the post war years. Despite these and other losses Flauberts last years are brightened by the affection of Guy de Maupassant Zola and other younger writers. Together with Francis Steegmullers masterly connecting narrative and essential annotation these letters most of which appear here in English for the first time constitute an intimate and engrossing new biography of the great master of the modern novel.