Gustave Flaubert
1821–1880
Biography
Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist born in Rouen in 1821. He trained for the law in Paris, but after an attack of epilepsy in 1846 he gave that up and returned to Croisset, a village near Rouen, where he lived for the rest of his life and died in 1880. He is widely seen as the chief figure of literary realism in France and well beyond.
Flaubert was famous for his perfectionism. He could spend a whole week on a single page, searching for le mot juste, the exact word, and he published far less than many of his contemporaries. His best-known novel, Madame Bovary, took about five years to write and was serialised in the Revue de Paris in 1856. The publisher and author were prosecuted for immorality, but both were acquitted in 1857, and the book was warmly received when it appeared in volume form. He followed it with Salammbô (1862), L'Éducation sentimentale (1869) and Three Tales (1877). His last work, Bouvard et Pécuchet, was left unfinished and published after his death in 1881 as a satire on the limits of human knowledge.
The site holds Madame Bovary. It follows Emma Bovary, the wife of a country doctor, whose romantic longings lead her into debt and ruin. Flaubert's exact prose and his impersonal narration made the novel a model for later realist fiction, and it remains the book by which he is most widely known. Readers coming to him here are looking at a work that helped define modern prose fiction.
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Books
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners (French: Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province, pronounced [madam bɔvaʁi mœʁ(s) də pʁɔvɛ̃s]), commonly known as simply Madame Bovary, is the début novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert, originally published in 1856 and 1857. The eponymous…
Summary from Wikipedia: Madame Bovary (CC BY-SA 4.0)