French Poets and Novelists Book

I love biography like this. Brown has written Flaubert's life so rich it becomes in part social portrait. Such events in the life of France as the great 1848 Revolution and the Franco-Prussian War are events affecting Flaubert, too, and so their detailed discussion adds to our understanding of the man. In telling Flaubert's story he has to tell France's, a double portrait. The same is true for the lives he touched. Ivan Turgenev, Louise Colet, George Sand, the Goncourts are given full, rounded treatments, their importance to 19th century letters covered as well as their importance to Flaubert. I'm not sure I learned that much about these relationships, though George Sand was more important to him and Louise Colet less so than I'd imagined. This is critical biography, too. The individual works are rigorously discussed from inception to reception by the public and those of the academy. In Brown's hands Salammbo and L'Education sentimentale are given the same weight as Madame Bovary. And the events of Flaubert's life germinating the works, such as the famous journey through Egypt, are described in depth. Flaubert's life is made a story unfolded as richly as that of a character of a novel.