The wind is warm as it rustles the great bank of yellow reeds on the riverside. They susurrate, whispering to each other, nodding and weaving their delicate heads together like lovers. The breeze ...

The last time I tried to “teach” Madame Bovary was in an advanced undergraduate course at a London university, and I had expected better results. The students either hated it or found it “boring,” and ...

Madame Bovary, c’est moi. The phrase, often attributed to Gustave Flaubert, may be better known than any line in his novels. But many scholars consider the remark to be apocryphal. It has trickled ...

There is probably no modern writer who is more talked about and less well-known than Gustave Flaubert. It is general believed, for example, that Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary with a deep distaste for ...

IN his essay on Gustave Flaubert Mr. Henry James, Jr., states the undisputed fact that Madame Bovary, the author’s first novel, has remained altogether his best. As for Salammbô, La Tentation de Saint ...

Peter Brooks's excellent Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year is the perfect companion for reading Flaubert's Sentimental Education. Flaubert ...

‘There are in me, literarily speaking, two distinct persons,” Gustave Flaubert wrote to his lover, the poet Louise Colet. One was “infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonorities of ...

Each fall, I teach “Madame Bovary” to my graduate writing students at Hunter College, and each fall I read it with them. My course is called Introduction to the Modern: The Role of Compassion. So we ...

For literature, 1984 was a very good year. Not in the 1922 league (after The Waste Land and Ulysses, nothing was the same), but still significant. The Booker Prize jury played safe with the small and ...