Gustave Flaubert

Literature / Writers Datebook: December 12

 

French writer, a Realist novelist, famous for Madame Bovary

 

Brief biography of French novelist Gustave Flaubert, his life and major books. He is considered one of the greatest and most influential novelists in his time.

 

A son of a doctor, French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), was born in Rouen, near Paris on December 12. His was a highly respected middle-class family of doctors.  

He was known to rebel against his background and was expelled from school. He reluctantly studied law in Paris, where his friendship with Victor Hugo, Maxime du Camp, and the poet Louise Colet, his lover for some eight years, stimulated his considerable apparent talent for writing.

When barely past his student days he was afflicted by an obscure form of nervous disease, something like epilepsy. Some critics think that this may have been to some extent responsible for the morbidity and pessimism which characterized his work from the very beginning. These traits, together with a violent hatred and contempt for bourgeois society, are revealed in his first masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1857), English translation 1881).

After contracting the disease, he failed his law exams. His father bought him a house on the River Seine, in Croisset. Here, he settled to write. At 25, following the death of his father and sister, his mother and niece joined him.  

As a writer, Gustave Flaubert was a perfectionist who constantly revised his manuscripts until he got them right. 

 Madame Bovary is a painful but powerful tragedy of a bored and unhappy bourgeois housewife who lived in a small French town. She seeks solace in dreams of ideal love, and miserable affairs. The book achieved a scandalous nevertheless successful, after it had been condemned as immoral and Flaubert prosecuted, therefore unsuccessfully, but to this day Madame Bovary holds its place among the classics. His second work, Salammbo, dealt with the struggle between Rome and Carthage and is over-weighed with archaeological detail.

L'Education sentimentale (Sentimental Education) was less effective, but in 1874 appeared the splendid LaTentation de St Antoine (The Temptation of St Anthony) appeared, the masterpiece of its kind.  Trois contes (Stories or Tales) reveals his mastery of the short story and foreshadows Guy de Maupassant, whom he greatly influenced.

After his death appeared Bouvard et Pecuchet (Bouvard and Pecuchet), which had not received his final revision. His correspondence with George Sand was published in 1884.

Although he became very bitter with life, he brought a new awareness of structure and form to the novel. Gustave Flaubert died, aged 58. 

 

Books by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary 1857

Salammbo 1862

A Sentimental Education 1869

The Temptation of Saint Antoine 1874

Three Tales 1877

Bouvard and Pecuchet 1881 (Published after he died)

 

Image Credit:

Gustav Flaubert. NNDB / Public Domain.

 

Resources:

Cambridge Guide to Literature in English by Ian Ousby.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Larousse Dictionary of Writers, edited by Rosemary Goring. Larousse Kingfisher Publishing,  1994.

Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

 

(c) September 2007. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserrved.