![]() ![]() His style moved Edmund Wilson to say,'Flaubert, by a single phrase - a notation of some commonplace object - can convey all the poignance of human desire, the pathos of human defeat his description of some homely scene will close with a dying fall that reminds one of great verse or music.' Flaubert died suddenly in May 1880, leaving his last work, Bouvard and Pécuchet, unfinished. Madame Bovary, novel by Gustave Flaubert, serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1856 and then published in two volumes the following year. For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. Flaubert's obsession with his art is legendary: he would work for days on a single page, obsessively attuning sentences, seeking always le mot juste in a quest for both beauty and precise observation. His reputation among his fellow writers, however, was more constant and those who admired him included Turgenev, George Sand, Victor Hugo and Zola. ![]() Both Salammbo (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) were poorly received, and Flaubert's genius was not publicly recognized until Three Tales (1877). Madame Bovary won instant acclaim upon book publication in 1857, but Flaubert's frank display of adultery in bourgeois France saw him go on trial for immorality, only narrowly escaping conviction. After three unhappy years of studying law in Paris, an epileptic attack ushered him into a life of writing. Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a distinguished surgeon and a doctor's daughter. ![]()
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