W.D. Clarke’s Reviews > Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks > Status Update

SOME TIME IN 1913, NOT LONG AFTER DU CÔTÉ DE CHEZ Swann was published, Marcel Proust, hot with the hubris of the writer whose creative energies were flowing freely, told an interviewer that writing their fictions, novelists create new worlds. To which Rebecca West tartly objected: “one of the damn things is enough.

... in the last sentences of the novel [Charles Bovary dies] of a broken heart. Meanwhile Monsieur Homais, that master of the liberal cliché, has risen to particular distinction in his little town. “The authorities humor him and public opinion supports him. He has just been given the cross of the Legion of Honor.” Flaubert wanted to make it perfectly plain: whoever lost, the bourgeoisie won.

“The means of reaching the ideal,” [Flaubert] observed to Hippolyte Taine, “is to write realistically, and one can write realistically only by choosing and exaggerating.”

In 1883, as new divorce legislation was being bitterly debated across the country, Zola noted, only half facetiously, that if the proposed law passed, it would be the end of French literature. What on earth would novelists write about [if not adultery]?

In the first essay, on Bleak House, PG mounts a pretty good defense of Esther Summerson (aka Agnes in David Copperfield)