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Flaubert: A life
The life and times of the great French novelist
A blond giant of a man with green eyes and a resonant actor's voice, Gustave Flaubert, perhaps the finest French writer of the nineteenth century, lived quietly in the provinces with his widowed mother, composing his incomparable novels at a rate of five words an hour. He detested his respectable neighbors, and they, in turn, helped to ensure his infamy as a writer of immoral books. Geoffrey Wall's remarkable new biography weaves together the inner dramas of Flaubert's provincial life with the social intrigues of his regular escapes to Paris, where he became a friend to Turgenev and was praised by the emperor, and the flamboyant excitements of his travels throughout the Mediterranean, on which he kept company with courtesans, acrobats, gypsies, and simpletons.
Flaubert's contradictory experiences nurtured his peerless novels and stories, and Wall's dynamic interpretation of them gives us a new understanding of his sometimes pitiable, always unforgettable an Egyptian hermit tormented by voluptuous visions, a melancholy doctor's wife eating arsenic to escape debt and despair, an old country woman who worships a stuffed parrot.
Wall's is the first full-fledged modern biography of this immeasurably talented and influential artist. Flaubert brilliantly re-creates the life and times of a writer who wrote to within an inch of his life and whose importance will never diminish.
A blond giant of a man with green eyes and a resonant actor's voice, Gustave Flaubert, perhaps the finest French writer of the nineteenth century, lived quietly in the provinces with his widowed mother, composing his incomparable novels at a rate of five words an hour. He detested his respectable neighbors, and they, in turn, helped to ensure his infamy as a writer of immoral books. Geoffrey Wall's remarkable new biography weaves together the inner dramas of Flaubert's provincial life with the social intrigues of his regular escapes to Paris, where he became a friend to Turgenev and was praised by the emperor, and the flamboyant excitements of his travels throughout the Mediterranean, on which he kept company with courtesans, acrobats, gypsies, and simpletons.
Flaubert's contradictory experiences nurtured his peerless novels and stories, and Wall's dynamic interpretation of them gives us a new understanding of his sometimes pitiable, always unforgettable an Egyptian hermit tormented by voluptuous visions, a melancholy doctor's wife eating arsenic to escape debt and despair, an old country woman who worships a stuffed parrot.
Wall's is the first full-fledged modern biography of this immeasurably talented and influential artist. Flaubert brilliantly re-creates the life and times of a writer who wrote to within an inch of his life and whose importance will never diminish.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2001
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About the author
Geoffrey Wall
29 books11 followersGeoffrey Wall is a literary biographer, a translator, a freelance travel-writer and an editor of The Cambridge Quarterly. His biography of Gustave Flaubert, published by Faber in 2001, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It has subsequently been published in American, Spanish and French editions. Geoffrey Wall's translations of Flaubert, published by Penguin, include Madame Bovary (1992), Selected Letters (1995), The Dictionary of Received Ideas (1997), Sentimental Education (2004) and Three Tales (2005). He has edited a wide-ranging collection of Jean-Paul Sartre's non-fiction, entitled Modern Times (Penguin 2001). His translation of Pierre Macherey's Theory of Literary Production was reissued as a Routledge Classic in 2006. Geoffrey Wall's current project is a biography of George Sand, the major woman writer of French Romanticism. He also has a strong interest in oral history and has recently set up the York Oral History Project.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 6, 2015
Flaubert’s life is not always a fascinating thing to behold . . . raised in comfort, flouted the father to pursue literature, travelled and slept with whores, embarked on an anti-romance with Louise Colet, faffed around for ages before writing Madame Bovary, cosied into fame and notoriety, wrote a more popular second novel no one reads in 2015, brief collusion in politics and uprising of the period, wrote his best novel A Sentimental Education, followed these up with mediocre works, and died from an epileptic attack before completing his potential masterpiece Bouvard and Pecuchet. Wall’s account is serviceable, lacking a real insight or deep engagement with Gustave in the manner we crave from the best bios, drawing from the correspondence largely to probe into the man’s past with little speculation or personal analysis. Determination to cleave to the facts and not to upset the academic apple cart means this bio is by no means the definitive book on the bloated anti-bourgeois bourgeois.
July 19, 2022
Ever read a book about one of your favourite writers and it kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth? It’s not the book, it’s the writer.
Gustave Flaubert was a writer whose works I first read many decades ago. Over the last year I reread Madame Bovary and Trois Contes. While reading this book I discovered that he wrote an earlier work, Mémoires d'un fou (1838). Yep, I still loved his work.
Now to be fair, Flaubert does not have a long list of accomplishments. Three novels, Madame Bovary (1857), Salammbô (1862) and L'Éducation sentimentale (1869). Two were unfinished, Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) and Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues (1911) were published after his death in 1880. La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874) is a prose poem and Trois contes (1877) is a collection of three short stories. If we count Mémoires d'un fou , that makes eight published works. But he didn’t live that long, he died at 59.
I learned a lot from this biography. The good, and of course, the very bad. He had epilepsy and that was a problem back then. He got syphilis from all those visits to brothels. It was treated with mercury. Your lips turned black, a give away sign when you were attending social functions of the day.
He was notoriously bad with money. So much so that his mother willed the country estate to his niece, fearing that he would just blow it. He was extravagant but complained like a pauper.
Let us talk about his mother. Was Flaubert a “mama’s boy?” It seemed his whole life centered around her. In his late twenties he went on a year long safari (including many brothels) with his old friend Maxime du Camp. Life was great, but exhausting, du Camp suggested they head east to Persia. Aghast, Flaubert wrote his mother to claim she needed him back home. Maybe he was sick of du Camp but he met her in Venice and the trip was officially over.
She kept a tight hand on his money but let him live at the family estate Croisset in Rouen. There he lived a confirmed bachelor. When he had his romantic interlude with the writer Louise Colet, her didn’t want her to come around to the estate. She tried but with failure.
In fact his relationships with women seemed very fraught at the best of times. Early on he had a brief affair with a married woman (the idea for Madame Bovary?) He also had a long standing relationship with George Sand in his latter years but when Sand died, he said it was like experiencing his mother’s death all over.
An interesting point that “Un cœur simple” was a reaction to one of Sand’s letters that annoyed Flaubert. It was to prove to her that he could write something after the mediocrity of L'Éducation sentimentale. Unfortunately Sand died before he could finish it.
He lived through so much, the revolution of 1848, the empire of Napoleon III and of course, it’s collapse when the Prussian army invaded France, including Prussian soldiers occupied his home of Croisset. But he cared less for politics. He didn’t want to be bourgeois and yet beckoned the call to the Princess Mathilde’s salon. She is nominated for le Chevaler de la Légion d’honneur thanks to his book, Salammbô. He hung out with a Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt and Ivan Turgenev. Definitely good company.
He was a perfectionist and laboured much too long over a work. He spent so much time acquiring extensive notes that a book could take decades, such as L'Éducation sentimentale. He started it in the 1840s and published it in 1869. The critics called it boring.
And that of course lead to his mental health. He suffered depression and fear of failure so much so that things had to be perfect. Even when George Sand invited him to enjoy the party, he turned out to be the cranky miserable old man and they couldn’t wait for him to leave.
And that leads to his end.* No one knows whether it was an epileptic fit or a cerebral hemorrhage or heart attack by an encounter with the maid? He died alone. He was facing the loss of his estate and yet, ironically his Trois Contes was a big success. His friends lobbied for him to get a pension. Well deserved.
And that was that. In some ways his life was appalling and yet amazing. He published one of the most famous books in history, Madame Bovary. Incidentally, the book was deemed immoral but he successfully lobbied, thanks to some powerful people, who said it was masterfully tale of realism.
He hated that term realism and joked that he was the self-proclaimed pope of realism. What on earth can we call it. Sure modernism but it seemed like realism to me.
Maybe Flaubert just like to stir up the hornet’s nest? Sand was right, maybe he was a miserable man but what he left us are some worthy works of literature. Does the end justify the means?
One wonders. Four stars for Geoffrey Wall, two stars for M. Flaubert. Let’s split it for a three.
*I can’t really give a spoiler since it ends with his death and no one knows how he died. Flaubert would have loved this.
Gustave Flaubert was a writer whose works I first read many decades ago. Over the last year I reread Madame Bovary and Trois Contes. While reading this book I discovered that he wrote an earlier work, Mémoires d'un fou (1838). Yep, I still loved his work.
Now to be fair, Flaubert does not have a long list of accomplishments. Three novels, Madame Bovary (1857), Salammbô (1862) and L'Éducation sentimentale (1869). Two were unfinished, Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) and Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues (1911) were published after his death in 1880. La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874) is a prose poem and Trois contes (1877) is a collection of three short stories. If we count Mémoires d'un fou , that makes eight published works. But he didn’t live that long, he died at 59.
I learned a lot from this biography. The good, and of course, the very bad. He had epilepsy and that was a problem back then. He got syphilis from all those visits to brothels. It was treated with mercury. Your lips turned black, a give away sign when you were attending social functions of the day.
He was notoriously bad with money. So much so that his mother willed the country estate to his niece, fearing that he would just blow it. He was extravagant but complained like a pauper.
Let us talk about his mother. Was Flaubert a “mama’s boy?” It seemed his whole life centered around her. In his late twenties he went on a year long safari (including many brothels) with his old friend Maxime du Camp. Life was great, but exhausting, du Camp suggested they head east to Persia. Aghast, Flaubert wrote his mother to claim she needed him back home. Maybe he was sick of du Camp but he met her in Venice and the trip was officially over.
She kept a tight hand on his money but let him live at the family estate Croisset in Rouen. There he lived a confirmed bachelor. When he had his romantic interlude with the writer Louise Colet, her didn’t want her to come around to the estate. She tried but with failure.
In fact his relationships with women seemed very fraught at the best of times. Early on he had a brief affair with a married woman (the idea for Madame Bovary?) He also had a long standing relationship with George Sand in his latter years but when Sand died, he said it was like experiencing his mother’s death all over.
An interesting point that “Un cœur simple” was a reaction to one of Sand’s letters that annoyed Flaubert. It was to prove to her that he could write something after the mediocrity of L'Éducation sentimentale. Unfortunately Sand died before he could finish it.
He lived through so much, the revolution of 1848, the empire of Napoleon III and of course, it’s collapse when the Prussian army invaded France, including Prussian soldiers occupied his home of Croisset. But he cared less for politics. He didn’t want to be bourgeois and yet beckoned the call to the Princess Mathilde’s salon. She is nominated for le Chevaler de la Légion d’honneur thanks to his book, Salammbô. He hung out with a Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt and Ivan Turgenev. Definitely good company.
He was a perfectionist and laboured much too long over a work. He spent so much time acquiring extensive notes that a book could take decades, such as L'Éducation sentimentale. He started it in the 1840s and published it in 1869. The critics called it boring.
And that of course lead to his mental health. He suffered depression and fear of failure so much so that things had to be perfect. Even when George Sand invited him to enjoy the party, he turned out to be the cranky miserable old man and they couldn’t wait for him to leave.
And that leads to his end.* No one knows whether it was an epileptic fit or a cerebral hemorrhage or heart attack by an encounter with the maid? He died alone. He was facing the loss of his estate and yet, ironically his Trois Contes was a big success. His friends lobbied for him to get a pension. Well deserved.
And that was that. In some ways his life was appalling and yet amazing. He published one of the most famous books in history, Madame Bovary. Incidentally, the book was deemed immoral but he successfully lobbied, thanks to some powerful people, who said it was masterfully tale of realism.
He hated that term realism and joked that he was the self-proclaimed pope of realism. What on earth can we call it. Sure modernism but it seemed like realism to me.
Maybe Flaubert just like to stir up the hornet’s nest? Sand was right, maybe he was a miserable man but what he left us are some worthy works of literature. Does the end justify the means?
One wonders. Four stars for Geoffrey Wall, two stars for M. Flaubert. Let’s split it for a three.
*I can’t really give a spoiler since it ends with his death and no one knows how he died. Flaubert would have loved this.
January 20, 2011
This was soo interesting. Much more scandalous and entertaining than I imagined it would be. I'm a Flaubert fan, so I may be biased, but I loved it. Slow start but it picks up fast.
July 29, 2015
Delightful and somewhat innovative writing style for a biography. Refreshing. Makes you feel like you are a contemporary of Flaubert's. Readable and intelligent.
March 5, 2025
Not that he was a prolific author, but I read 2 of Flaubert's novels - Madame Bovary & A Sentimental Education - in the late 80s & enjoyed them both. Judging by Wall's biog, however, I doubt I would have enjoyed his actual company. The frustrating part for me, as a working class kid who also grew up to write, was that Flaubert never had to work, in an actual job, for a single day in his life. His family were wealthy enough for him to live comfortably - he resided mainly in Rouen but also enjoyed digs in Paris - & travel extensively. He achieved celebrity enough to develop friendships with many other literary heavyweights of the period, including George Sand & Emile Zola (my personal favourite 19th century author). I still find biographies engaging & am glad I read this one, although I am constantly wondering how even the most forensic biographers could have verified some of the claims they make, particularly in regard to minor details of somebody's life. Of interest.
July 31, 2023
Realmente una obra lograda; la presentación del material nos permite acercarnos a la vida de un hombre excepcional, descrita de forma erudita mas no pedante, sino accesible; conocer su relación con su madre, con su amante, con sus amistades (literarias o no), las injusticias para con sus libros (incluido el proceso por obsenidad) mientras construía una de las más valiosas obras de la literatura universal. "Además", como se señala en el Book Magazine, "realiza un apasionante retrato de la Francia del siglo XIX: sus intrigas, la vida en provincias y la alta burguesía. A la hora de comentar los temas de la obra de Flaubert, el autor se muestra capaz y minucioso. Y aún es mejor cuando nos cuenta la vida del hombre, tan fascinante como sus textos".
March 13, 2020
Flaubert was an extraordinarily unpleasant and even repellent person who wrote a masterpiece and, with the possible exception of one story, several other works that are still read only because their author once wrote Madame Bovary.
November 10, 2014
Wonderfully interesting read.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews