Francis Steegmuller's beautifully executed double portrait of Madame Bovary and her maker is a remarkable and unusual biographical study, a sensitive and detailed account of how an unpromising young man turns himself into one of the world's greatest novelists. Steegmuller starts with the young Flaubert, prone to mysterious fits, hypochondriacal, at odds with and yet dependent on his bourgeois family. Then, drawing on Flaubert's voluminous correspondence, Steegmuller tracks his subject through friendships and love affairs, a trip to the Orient, nervous breakdown and tenuous recovery, and finally into the study, where a mind at once restless and jaded finds a focus in the precisely detailed reality of an imagined woman, utterly ordinary in her unhappiness, whose story was to revolutionize literature.
- ISBN10 0094724806
- ISBN13 9780094724808
- Publish Date 16 August 1993 (first published April 1968)
- Publish Status Transferred
- Out of Print 1 August 2007
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
- Imprint Constable
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 362
- Language English