Flaubert and Madame Bovary [Paperback]

Francis Steegmuller (Author), Victor Brombert (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: November 30, 2004

Francis Steegmuller's beautifully executed double portrait of Madame Bovary and her maker is a remarkable and unusual biographical study, a sensitive and detailed account of how an unpromising young man turns himself into one of the world's greatest novelists. Steegmuller starts with the young Flaubert, prone to mysterious fits, hypochondriacal, at odds with and yet dependent on his bourgeois family. Then, drawing on Flaubert's voluminous correspondence, Steegmuller tracks his subject through friendships and love affairs, a trip to the Orient, nervous breakdown and tenuous recovery, and finally into the study, where a mind at once restless and jaded finds a focus in the precisely detailed reality of an imagined woman, utterly ordinary in her unhappiness, whose story was to revolutionize literature.

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About the Author

FRANCIS STEEGMULLER (1906-1994) was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and educated in the public schools of Greenwich and at Columbia University. He was the author of many works about French culture and its great literary figures; translator of Gustave Flaubert’s letters and of the Modern Library edition of Madame Bovary. He was the recipient of many literary honors, including the National Book Award for his biography of Jean Cocteau, and he was a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Steegmuller divided his life between New York City and Europe. In 1963, he married the novelist Shirley Hazzard. He died in Naples in 1994.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (November 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590171160
• ISBN-13: 978-1590171165
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #792,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Madame Bovary, c'est lui, March 19, 2009

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This review is from: Flaubert and Madame Bovary (Paperback)

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.