Flaubert - Frederick Brown

Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary outraged the right-thinking bourgeoisie, is now brought to life in Frederick Brown's new biography in all his singularity and brilliance. Frederick Brown's portrayal is of an artist fraught with contradictions - his wit and bravado co-existing with great vulnerability. A sedentary man, Flaubert undertook epic voyages through Egypt and the Middle East. He could be flamboyantly uncouth, but was fanatically devoted to beautifully cadenced prose. While energized by his camaraderie with male friends, who included Turgenev, the Goncourt brothers, Zola, and Maupassant, he depended for emotional nurturing upon maternal women, notably George Sand. His assorted mistresses-French, Egyptian, and English-fed his richly erotic imagination and found their way into his fictional characters. Nineteenth-century France literally put him on trial for portraying 'lewd behavior' in Madame Bovary. But it also made of him a celebrity and, indirectly, brought about his financial ruin, probably hastening his sudden death at the age of fifty-nine. Although writing was something like torture to him, it preoccupied his mind and dominated his life.;He privately dreamed of popular success, which he in fact achieved with Madame Bovary, but adamantly refused to sacrifice to it his ideal of artistic integrity. Whether of Flaubert's life, inner world, times and legacy, Frederick Brown's magisterial biography is a revelation.