Customer Reviews

Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait

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Francis Steegmuller's biography of Gustave Flaubert that focuses primarily on how he came to become a great novelist (and wrote his first published major work, MADAME BOVARY, which was to define him for the rest of his life and after) is not only as much fun as when it first came out in the Thirties but it even anticipates later experiments in biographical form. Many biographers now focus on shorter periods in their subjects' lives to tell clearer stories, and in doing so they look back to this groundbreaking work. The sharper focus allows Steegmuller a strong narrative drive (which is otherwise always a problem in biography), and as a result he constructs a novelistic story--one even suggestive of Flaubert himself. Steegmuller allows Flaubert's famously sumptuous letters to his mistress Louise Colet, and his travel diaries of Egypt, to take over a large part of his story sometimes to the detriment of the narrative arc (although no one could really complain about getting Flaubert's own writing in large chunks). However, in letting Flaubert's point of view so dominate his own that he does wind up seeming as biased against Colet as Flaubert was during the worst parts of their stormy long affair. But in a biography of this sort could there be any other possible outcome? The descriptions of Rouen and Croisset and Genoa and Egypt are colored with how the always restless novelists must have seen them; this biography gives you a much stronger sense of its subject's personality that more conventional ones could.