The wind is warm as it rustles the great bank of yellow reeds on the riverside. They susurrate, whispering to each other, nodding and weaving their delicate heads together like lovers. The breeze ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

‘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 ...

Gustave Flaubert's writing of Madame Bovary has often been considered the work of a genius who labored intensely and in solitude on the writing and rewriting of his novel, first published in 1856 in ...

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 ...

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 ...