Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880/Novelists, French > 19th century > Biography

The great French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) has a reputation as an ivory-towered, art-for-art's-sake writer, but there was another Flaubert, one Wall inclines toward in this briskly readable and welcome new biography. This Flaubert visible in his letters to his friend and publisher Maxime Du Camp, his difficult lover Louise Colet and his peer (and rival) George Sand was mercurial, passionate, vivacious, even Rabelaisian. Wall (who translated Madame Bovary and other works for Penguin Classics), like Flaubert himself, downplays the Realist writer for the Romantic who appreciated Victor Hugo (and de Sade). At the outset of his career, Flaubert was enjoying himself in Paris, neglecting his legal studies and writing his first novel, which would become A Sentimental Education. His first nervous attack, which occurred while visiting his family in provincial Rouen and which Wall diagnoses as epilepsy, not only cut off Flaubert's legal career and curtailed his love of travel, but it partly accounted for his sedentary reclusiveness. Though Flaubert quarantined himself for years at his family home to write, Wall gives full attention to the enterprising episodes in which the writer broke free of his self-imposed routine: his extensive travels in Egypt and his later socializing in Paris's Second Empire salons. While the novelist famously detested the bourgeoisie, politics and modernity, Wall argues that his father's eminently bourgeois success as a doctor shadowed his younger son's work habits and even his aesthetic, and that the events of the Revolution in 1848 and the Commune were barely checked on the margins of Flaubert's life and art. Wall's first book, this was short-listed for England's prestigious Whitbread Award.

Wall has translated many of Flaubert's famed novels, but this is his first whirl at writing a book himself. Surprisingly little has appeared on Flaubert, so this is a welcome treat.