Victor Hugo: A Biography

This big biography was a Whitbread biography award winner in 1997. It is very well written and erudite. It represents an honest attempt to sort out myth from fact and present a balanced picture of Hugo's background, views and actions. e.g. the fact that his mother was not really a royalist heroine as portrayed during the author's reactionary youth; and Hugo's own growing radicalism, albeit still with contradictions under the last King, Louis-Philippe. Hugo's rage at Louis Napoleon's coup of 1851, his exile to Belgium, then Jersey and finally for many years, Guernsey; then his return during the tragedy of the Franco-Prussian war and it's bloody aftermath, the repression of the Paris Commune, are brilliantly documented, including the effect on his literary oeuvre. It is surprising perhaps that Hugo wrote only seven novels, albeit two of the greatest ever penned in Les Miserables and Notre Dame de Paris; but his output of poetry was phenomenal. What also comes across is the tragedy of his family, the falling out of his parents, the madness of his brother Eugene and the fact that four of his five children predeceased him, just one daughter living into the 20th century, but tragically a victim of the same madness as her uncle.

This was well worth reading, albeit at times a bit too densely literary for me. It gives a superb portrait of the complexity of this frustrating genius of a writer. ( )

Hugo was a larger-than-life literary figure who bestrode the 19th-century literary scene like a colossus. This book is more admiring of Hugo than I can be, though one must admire Hugo's opposition to Napoleon III. This was a fun book to read, at least toward the end. ( )