Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a surgeon, and spent much of his adult life in Croisset, a house on the Seine near Rouen, where he worked at a pace that made his contemporaries impatient and produced one of the most precisely crafted bodies of work in French literature. He was, by temperament and conviction, an aesthete who believed that beauty in prose was achievable only through sustained, painful effort: he spoke of the mot juste — the exact right word — as the standard against which every sentence should be measured, and he spent hours on single paragraphs, reading them aloud to test their rhythm, revising until the sound and meaning were inseparable.

Madame Bovary (1856), his first novel, was tried for obscenity and acquitted — the prosecution, paradoxically, made it famous — and is now understood as the founding text of modern realism. Emma Bovary is a country doctor's wife who has been educated on Romantic novels and expects her life to correspond to their patterns. It does not. She takes lovers. She accumulates debt. She destroys the lives of those around her. The novel's radical quality, which was what disturbed contemporary readers, is that Flaubert refuses to judge her: he describes with equal precision Emma's illusions and the reality they collide with, the contemptible smallness of provincial life and the self-destructive grandiosity of Emma's response to it, without telling the reader which to prefer. The famous line — "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" — may or may not be apocryphal; whether or not he said it, the identification with his protagonist's imprisoned imagination was real.

His other major works are Salammbô (1862), a historical novel set in Carthage that shocked readers with its archaeological detail and its violence; A Sentimental Education (1869), his most autobiographical novel, following a young man through the Paris of 1848 and the failed revolution with a melancholy that has come to define a kind of novel about disappointed idealism; and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (multiple versions), a hallucinatory prose poem he worked on throughout his life. His correspondence, especially the letters to Louise Colet, is among the most complete records of a writer's working methods in any language.

He died in Croisset in 1880, at fifty-eight, leaving Bouvard et Pécuchet unfinished — a vast satirical encyclopedia of human stupidity that his niece completed and published posthumously. He had spent most of his inheritance by the end of his life, partly supporting his niece and her husband's failed business. His friends included Turgenev and the Goncourt brothers; Maupassant was his literary disciple.

The influence of Madame Bovary on the subsequent development of the novel is so pervasive as to be difficult to trace: the third-person intimate narrator who moves inside a consciousness while maintaining ironic distance, the refusal of moral summary, the insistence that ordinary life is sufficient material for literary art — these became the default assumptions of serious fiction in French, English, and beyond. Henry James read him carefully. Chekhov read him carefully. Anyone who writes realist fiction in the European tradition is, whether they know it or not, working in Flaubert's shadow.