Gustave Flaubert
1 book analyzed
Biography
Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was born in Rouen, Normandy, the son of a distinguished surgeon. He studied law in Paris, suffered a mysterious neurological breakdown at twenty-two, and retreated to the family estate at Croisset, where he would spend the rest of his life in almost monastic dedication to prose. He had a long, passionate, intellectually charged correspondence with the writer Louise Colet, who became his primary correspondent during the writing of Madame Bovary. He never married. The novel took five years to write (1851–1856), during which his letters to Colet constitute a running commentary on every sentence. On publication in serial form in 1856, the government prosecuted Flaubert and his publisher for 'offending public morals and religion.' They were acquitted. The novel became one of the most celebrated in French literature. Flaubert spent the rest of his life working on Salammbô, Sentimental Education, and the unfinished Bouvard and Pécuchet, dying in 1880 without completing it.