Product Description

Gustave Flaubert (18211880), whose Madame Bovary outraged the right-thinking bourgeoisie, is now brought to life as the singular person and artist he was. As Frederick Brown reveals, Flaubert was fraught with contradictiona sedentary man who took epic voyages through Egypt and the Middle East; a man of genius who could be flamboyantly uncouth, but was fanatically devoted to beautifully cadenced prose. While making much of his camaraderie with male friends, Flaubert depended upon the emotional nurture of maternal women, notably George Sand, with whom he engaged in a justly celebrated correspondence. His assorted mistressesFrench, Egyptian, and Englishfed both his richly erotic imagination and his fictional characters, and his letters provide a record of them. Flauberts time and place literally put him on trial for portraying lewd behavior in Madame Bovary. His milieu also made him a celebrity and, indirectly, brought about his financial ruin. Flaubert died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine, and soon afterward, his beloved retreat near Rouen was torn down and converted into a distillery to cover his nieces debts. He privately dreamed of popular success, which he in fact achieved with Madame Bovary, but never sacrificed to it his ideal of artistic integrity. Frederick Browns magisterial biography honors his subjects life, times, and legacy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #493688 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 640 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. At last, a biography commensurate with the outsize personality and genius of Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880). Brown, author of an acclaimed biography of Zola, offers a tantalizing, penetrating study that embeds the author of Madame Bovary in his time and place: a tumultuous Paris during the revolution of 1848 and the period of expansion and greed known as the Second Empire.But even more than Paris, for all that he despised the provincial, Flaubert's place was his native Rouen, in Normandy. As Brown writes in a graceful opening paragraph: "It was the province that furnished his imagination.... It was the landscape of his youth and of all his seasons. It was the taste in his mouth and the verdant prison where he dreamed of deserts."Brown achieves a kind of Flaubertian distance in describing his subject and his circle, a dispassionate objectivity that includes a subtle sense of the comic in their often neurotic, self-dramatizing behavior: he sees the bourgeois in a man who professed contempt for everything bourgeois, and he calls Flaubert's mistress Louise Colet his "antimuse." (Refreshingly, Brown takes no sides in the reciprocal torment that was their love affair.)Brown illustrates the torrents of romanticism flowing through Flaubert that he had to dam up in writing Madame Bovary—which now appears as a near-epic feat of artistic self-mastery.Rich, full of passion and tragedy, overflowing with keenly portrayed characters, this superb biography gives us an unforgettable portrait of a literary master: exuberant yet anxious, brilliant yet full of self-doubt, a man who best savored the women he loved in their absence, an artist who claimed to scorn fame but reveled in it once achieved, who couldn't bear loss but whose life was sadly filled with it. 24 pages of b&w photos. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Geoffrey Wall's 2002 biography, Flaubert: A Life, sought to unwrap the inscrutable author through Freudian analysis, but critics seem to prefer Brown's more straightforward approach. The literary biographer—see Brown's Zola: A Life (1995)—delivers the earthier elements of Flaubert's story with panache and marshals an impressive array of research on French history to provide rich context for his story. If Brown has a tendency toward an overwhelmingly detailed exegesis of Flaubert's works, it's not detraction enough to halt declaring this the biography of record.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* The young Gustave Flaubert glumly predicted that he would end up "a cog like everybody else." However, in this pathbreaking biography, Brown deftly limns the turns--psychological, artistic, amorous--by which Flaubert decisively turned away from his feared destiny of dull conformity. As Geoffrey Wall did in his excellent 2002 biography of the French author, Brown recognizes in Flaubert's remarkable fusion of classical style and modern realism an aesthetic of unparalleled brilliance, most luminously embodied in Madame Bovary. And although Brown lacks some of the intimate familiarity with Flaubert's fiction that Wall gained as his translator, he surpasses Wall (and so complements Wall's artistically focused biography) in detailing Flaubert's economic and historical context. Readers learn from Brown, for instance, much about how the grim cotton economy of Flaubert's hometown of Rouen did indeed transform thousands into factory cogs. Readers further come to understand how the fiercely independent Flaubert defied both the radical egalitarianism that sparked the abortive uprising of 1848 and the bourgeois conservatism that helped suppress that revolution. But amid the tempestuous political events that shaped Flaubert's world, Brown traces the fruitful literary symbiosis that connected the French novelist to Zola and Chateaubriand, to Turgenev and Sand. And Brown recognizes Flaubert's enduring legacy, providing a model of artistic integrity for Kafka and a sense of the usable past for Cather. A landmark biography. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Superb scholarship but title misleads
I understand that another author's biography was more psychological and I understand that Frederick Brown wanted to examine Flaubert in a more social, historical context. I just wish Brown had come up with a slightly different title for his biography of my all-time favorite writer. Titling the biography *Flaubert* lent me to think the biography would be more psychological, rather than historical. Perhaps Brown should have considered something like *Flaubert and Normandy* or *Flaubert's Normandy.* The historical passages are well done, but I wonder if they could have been trimmed a bit. Though I have been trained in European history, I gritted my teeth while reading every word. I wonder if Brown thought to himself, "Now let me get through this so that we can get back to Flaubert's literary tribulations and relationships." Flaubert's literary struggles and relationships are the most fascinating part of this biography.

My gripes aside, this biography is densely (in the best sense of the word) and beautifully written. Flaubert's best and not so great moments are limned gorgeously. The most touching aspect of the man is how good he was to his niece Caroline and how she honored his memory. I wished I had been Willa Cather when she encountered Caroline to talk about "les ouevres de mon oncle."

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A Definitive Biography
'Madame Bovary,' Flaubert's signature work celebrates 150 years of basically continuous publication. Shocking at the time because of its portrayal of the infidelities of a married woman, its publication caused Flaubert to be tried for lewdness.

Flaubert, like many writers was a tortured soul. One page from his original manuscript of 'Madame Bovary,' shows pained writing, much crossing out and re-writing. For him writing was not something he enjoyed, but more along the lines of something that he had to do. The words did not flow easily and fast, instead he struggled over each sentence, each word. But at the end, a book still in print in perhaps a dozen editions in English alone a century and a half later.

This new biography gives a look at both the life of Flaubert and also of his times. Here is a picture of the literary world that was Paris in the middle 1800's. Flaubert observed first hand the Revolution of 1848 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. While not a history of these events, Mr. Brown presents a view of them from their impact on Flaubert.

This is likely to remain the definitive biography of Flaubert for many years.