The Life of Henry Brulard

By Stendhal
Preface by Lydia Davis
Translated and with an introduction by John Sturrock

The Life of Henry Brulard is the autobiography of one of France's greatest writers, Stendhal, author of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Here, writing at white heat and with such ferocious honesty and indignation that his book was to remain unpublishable for more than a century after its composition, Stendhal revisits his unhappy childhood in a stuffy provincial town and bares his rebellious heart. His adored mother, who died when he was only seven; a father devoted only to his own social ambitions; the aunt whose daily cruelties passed for care: these are among the indelible portraits in a work that captures the sights, sounds, places, and characters of Stendhal's youth, its pleasures and sorrows, with preternatural clarity and immediacy. Full of dazzling images and burning emotions, The Life of Henry Brulard is a vivid memoir that is also an extraordinary work of the imagination.

Reviews

[Stendhal is] an autobiographer who has no time for the fallen bourgeois world, who despises his compatriots, but who digs deep into himself and his past in order to try and discover why this should be so—to our own vast benefit and pleasure as his future readers.
— John Sturrock

Stendhal's style is inextricable from his substance— the speed from his passion, the irony from the worldliness.
— Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Times Book Review

He lived, He wrote, He loved
— Stendhal's self-composed epitaph

Stendhal's autobiography, written in 1835 and 1836, and carrying forward the story of his life by fits and starts to his seventeenth year, with fragmentary anticipations of later events, is one of the remarkable nineteenth-century documents of self-exploration. It is also an exemplary instance of the peculiar challenge Stendhal's quicksilver prose presents to the translator, a challenge admirably met by John Sturrock in his lively and faithful English version of La Vie de Henry Brulard.
— Robert Alter, The Times Literary Supplement

Also see:

Madame de Pompadour By Nancy Mitford Introduction by Amanda Foreman Nancy Mitford's delightfully candid biography re-creates the spirit of eighteenth-century Versailles with its love of pleasure and treachery.

The Unknown Masterpiece By Honoré de Balzac Translated from the French by Richard Howard Introduction by Arthur C. Danto The story, which has served as an inspiration to artists as various as Cézanne, Henry James, Picasso, and New Wave director Jacques Rivette, is, in critic Dore Ashton's words, a "fable of modern art."

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian By Nirad C. Chaudhuri Introduction by Ian Jack The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is an astonishing work of self-discovery and the revelation of a peerless and provocative sensibility.

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