num_pages: 384
description: Francis Steegmuller's beautifully executed double portrait of Madame Bovary and her maker is a remarkable and unusual biographical study, a sensitive and detailed account of how an unpromising young man turns himself into one of the world's greatest novelists. Steegmuller starts with the young Flaubert, prone to mysterious fits, hypochondriacal, at odds with and yet dependent on his bourgeois family. Then, drawing on Flaubert's voluminous correspondence, Steegmuller tracks his subject through friendships and love affairs, a trip to the Orient, nervous breakdown and tenuous recovery, and finally into the study, where a mind at once restless and jaded finds a focus in the precisely detailed reality of an imagined woman, utterly ordinary in her unhappiness, whose story was to revolutionise literature.
language: English
title: Flaubert and Madame Bovary
titlecomplete: Flaubert and Madame Bovary
characters: Gustave Flaubert
genres: 20th Century, Biography, Writing, Literature, Criticism, Nonfiction, History, Literary Criticism, Books About Books, France
ratings_count: 199
publisher: NYRB Classics