The Letters of Gustave Flaubert

Appearing in a single volume for the very first time, an illuminating and enrichingly annotated selection of correspondence from one of Western literature's most revered writers. 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. 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. "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. 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. (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 correspondence with family and...