That Flaubert, as a writer and as the kind of writer he was, was born rather than made is plainly indicated by the first few letters in Francis Steegmuller’s excellent new selection. Originally issued in two volumes, the book appears here for the first time under a single cover. Steegmuller’s book, recognized as a classic in its own right, is both a splendid life story of Flaubert in his own words and the ars poetica of a master. Here we have Flaubert's correspondence with family and friends describing his life-changing trip to Egypt, exchanges with Baudelaire, the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, and Guy de Maupassant, his young protege, as well as the letters that went back and forth between him and the great confidante of his later life, George Sand. (Looking back on his early work, he writes, “How I congratulate myself on the prescience I had not to publish!”) Here we have Flaubert's youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, his wrestle to write Madame Bovary.

“If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert's correspondence,” Steegmuller's introduction begins, “it is that the function of art is not to provide ‘answers,’” and The Letters of Gustave Flaubert is above all a record of the intransigent questions, personal, political, artistic, with which Flaubert struggled throughout his life. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830–1880 is Francis Steegmuller's extensive selection from the writer's correspondence, to which he adds deft biographical bridgework and agile annotation. Flaubert was not only a great novelist, one of the inventors of of the modern novel, but a great letter writer, writing letters that are among other things a remarkable exploration of the art of the novel.

Flaubert books