The Letters of Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert

вер 2023 · New York Review of Books

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Appearing in a single volume for the very first time, an illuminating and enrichingly annotated selection of correspondence from one of Western literature’s most revered writers.

“If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence,” Francis Steegmuller writes in the introduction to this selection of Flaubert’s letters, “it is that the function of great art is not to provide ‘answers.’” The Letters of Gustave Flaubert is above all a record of the intransigent questions—personal, political, artistic—with which Flaubert struggled throughout his life.

Here we have Flaubert’s youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, the wrestle to write Madame Bovary. We hear, too, of his life-changing trip to Egypt, as described to family and friends, and then there are lively exchanges with Baudelaire, with the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, and with Guy de Maupassant, his young protégé. Flaubert’s letters to George Sand reveal her as the great confidante of his later years.

Steegmuller’s book, a classic in its own right, is both a splendid life of Flaubert in his own words and the ars poetica of the master who laid the foundations for modern writers from James Joyce to Lydia Davis. Originally issued in two volumes, the book appears here for the first time under a single cover.

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Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was a French novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. Born in Rouen to a distinguished surgeon, Flaubert moved in 1841 to study law in Paris, where he first became involved with the city’s literary scene. Flaubert”s use of psychological realism in his masterpieces, Madame Bovary and L'Éducation sentimentale, earned him a reputation as one of the most influential novelists of the nineteenth century.

Francis Steegmuller (1906–1994) was the author of many works about French culture and its great literary figures, as well as a translator of Gustave Flaubert's letters. He won the National Book Award for his biography of Jean Cocteau, and he was a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.