Gustave Flaubert (1821 - 1880) was a French novelist regarded as one of the leading figures of literary realism. His first published novel, Madame Bovary, brought him a public obscenity trial and lasting fame, and his insistence on exact language and detached narration influenced generations of writers. [1] He also wrote Salammbô, Sentimental Education and Three Tales, and left an extensive correspondence that is read as a work in its own right. [2]
Early life and education
Gustave Flaubert was born on 12 December 1821 in Rouen, in Normandy, where his father was chief surgeon at the city hospital. He grew up in quarters attached to the hospital, an upbringing sometimes connected with the clinical detachment of his later prose. He was educated at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen and began writing fiction while still a schoolboy. [1]
In 1841 he went to Paris to study law, a course he pursued without enthusiasm. In 1844 he suffered the first of a series of seizures, and the resulting ill health allowed him to abandon law altogether. After his father's death in 1846 he settled at the family property at Croisset on the Seine near Rouen, where he lived with his mother and devoted himself to writing. [2]
Travel and method
Between 1849 and 1851 Flaubert travelled through Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece and Italy with his friend the writer and photographer Maxime Du Camp. The journey supplied material and imagery for his oriental subjects and confirmed his taste for the exotic that coexisted with his realism. [1]
He worked with exceptional slowness, reading sentences aloud to test their rhythm and searching for what he called le mot juste, the exact word. He also advanced the technique of free indirect discourse, in which a character's thoughts are rendered in the narrator's third person without quotation, giving his novels their characteristic irony. [3]
Major works
Madame Bovary was serialised in the Revue de Paris in 1856 and published as a book the following year. Its portrait of Emma Bovary, a provincial doctor's wife whose romantic expectations lead her into adultery and debt, prompted a prosecution for offences against public morals; Flaubert was acquitted, and the trial made the novel a sensation. [3]
He followed it with Salammbô (1862), a heavily researched historical novel set in ancient Carthage, and Sentimental Education (1869), which traces a young man's ambitions against the background of the 1848 revolution in France. [4] The Temptation of Saint Anthony appeared in 1874 after decades of revision, and Three Tales in 1877. The satirical Bouvard et Pécuchet was left unfinished at his death.
Later life and legacy
Flaubert was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour and moved in Parisian literary circles that included George Sand, Ivan Turgenev and Émile Zola; he acted as a mentor to the young Guy de Maupassant. Financial losses incurred to help his niece's family clouded his last years. He died at Croisset on 8 May 1880. [1]
His influence on the novel has been profound and durable, reaching writers as different as Henry James, James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov. His letters, particularly those on the labour of composition, remain among the most quoted statements of literary craft. [2]
