Selected Letters

Spanning Flaubert’s life from adolescence to his years of fame as a writer, this collection of letters is a compelling portrait of the artist. There are early letters imbued with the intensity of adolescent friendships; reports from the Orient that bring to life an exotic place where the picturesque, the sentimental, and the erotic gloriously coexist; and accounts of the writing of Madame Bovary that meticulously chronicle Flaubert’s creative process. Letters to Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Ivan Turgenev, Emile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant offers a glimpse into nineteenth-century literary life; while those letters to George Sand bring to light a deep, abiding friendship. In the correspondence between Flaubert and his lover Louise Colet, Geoffrey Wall suggests in his Introduction, we witness an erotic game, a highly charged form of illicit intercourse.