Madame Bovary, c’est moi. The phrase, often attributed to Gustave Flaubert, may be better known than any line in his novels. But many scholars consider the remark to be apocryphal. It has trickled ...

‘There are in me, literarily speaking, two distinct persons,” Gustave Flaubert wrote to his lover, the poet Louise Colet. One was “infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonorities of ...

The bicentenary of the birth of Gustave Flaubert last December was a reminder of the ongoing relevance of the French novelist as a writer engaged with deeply religious themes. His sometimes sardonic ...

It could take him days to write a sentence. From July to November 1853, he labored over a single scene. He suffered, as if from a physical ailment, from “scribbling whole pages” without producing any ...

Peter Brooks's excellent Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year is the perfect companion for reading Flaubert's Sentimental Education. Flaubert ...

Geoffrey Wall is an academic and also a translator, whose version of Madame Bovary appeared in 1992. His new life of Gustave Flaubert, though, takes care not to get bogged down in the details. These ...

I have read English translations of Madame Bovary four times now, and until this one, by Lydia Davis, I always appreciated Gustave Flaubert's novel with a somewhat removed feeling - stamped it as ...

IN his essay on Gustave Flaubert Mr. Henry James, Jr., states the undisputed fact that Madame Bovary, the author’s first novel, has remained altogether his best. As for Salammbô, La Tentation de Saint ...