Flaubert and Madame Bovary

A Double Portrait

By Francis Steegmuller
Introduction by Victor Brombert

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.

Reviews

The story of Flaubert's growth and the manner of the inception of his masterpiece form the material for the dramatist (not to say the humorist) rather than the purely literary critic. Mr. Steegmuller has taken advantage of this fact. The result is a book which...must be termed absorbing.
— Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker

The strange and fascinating story of Flaubert has never been told more engagingly than by Mr. Steegmuller. Infusing animation and color into the past, he has reestablished a living Flaubert in his particular environment. He has succeeded especially in the tremendous task of integrating the man, his theories and his work...The book is beautifully written, and it should prove to be informing and absorbing for both the neophyte and the initiate. Mr. Steegmuller himself has accomplished a real tour de force in treating his subject so brilliantly.
— Joseph F. Jackson, Saturday Review

His 'portrait' is an admirable accomplishment in research and thought, in the dramatic sense, and in a well-concealed virtuosity. It is fresh and illuminating. It is a piece of vividly interesting reading. And it is surprisingly objective.
— Katherine Woods, New York Times

Steegmuller's book is a classic of literary journalism, beautifully arranged in balanced sentences.
— Matthew Hodgart, New York Review of Books

In his segregation of the relevant from a tempting superfluity of information Mr. Steegmuller shows himself a true biographer. In his delicate weaving together of these diverse strands into the single but complex theme of Madame Bovary's creation he shows himself a true artist.
— Philip Toynbee

A most instructive, perspicacious and amusing portrait of the bear of Croisset, and the gifts of novelists and scholar have been married with unusual happiness in its production.
— V. S. Pritchett

I would make you read some of the stuff that's sitrred me lately... Flaubert and Madame Bovary — absolute tops!
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Flaubert and Madame Bovary can justly be called a brilliant achievement. Mr. Steegmuller is a superb stylist, and even were his study second-rate in other respects (which it is not), it would still be worth reading for the sheer perfection of its prose.
— Lewis Mumford

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