{"product_id":"the-letters-of-gustave-flaubert-18571880-vol-2","title":"The Letters of Gustave Flaubert  1857-1880 (Vol. 2)","description":"\u003cp\u003eHaving 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44987157053493,"sku":"ByrdShop_0674526406","price":72.42,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780674526402.jpg?v=1770927364","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-letters-of-gustave-flaubert-18571880-vol-2","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}