Francis Steegmuller

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.

A Double Portrait

Flaubert and Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert

“If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence,” Francis Steegmuller writes in the introduction to this selection of Flaubert’s letters, “it is that the function of great art is not to provide ‘answers.’” The Letters of Gustave Flaubert is above all a record of the intransigent questions—personal, political, artistic—with which Flaubert struggled throughout his life.

Here we have Flaubert’s youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, the wrestle to write Madame Bovary. We hear, too, of his life-changing trip to Egypt, as described to family and friends, and then there are lively exchanges with Baudelaire, with the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, and with Guy de Maupassant, his young protégé. Flaubert’s letters to George Sand reveal her as the great confidante of his later years.

Steegmuller’s book, a classic in its own right, is both a splendid life of Flaubert in his own words and the ars poetica of the master who laid the foundations for modern writers from James Joyce to Lydia Davis. Originally issued in two volumes, the book appears here for the first time under a single cover.

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert

Pre-revolutionary Paris comes to life in this fascinating story surrounding the correspondence between two colorful and witty society figures: the French author Louise d'Épinay and the Italian priest-diplomat Ferdinando Galiani. Their friends included Voltaire, Diderot, Melchior Grimm, and the famous women of the salons, and their letters touched upon everything from social gossip to issues of education and politics. Francis Steegmuller's book is at once a unique history and a charming account of friendship sustained in a turbulent age. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Story of Madame D'Epinay and the Abbé Galiani

A Woman, a Man, and Two Kingdoms

Flaubert & Madame Bovary

Grande Rue -- Le camping -- Watch out! -- Allo Allo? -- Bereft --Cuisine francaise: Summer, 1945 -- Deauville beach, 1945 -- Getting home -- The perfect secretary -- Massoors and massooses -- The foreigner -- The insistent friend -- A ride with Ralph -- My already overcrowded home -- A few of our things -- Pretzels and ice cream -- Babes on 57th Street -- The snake man -- The weaver -- Les noctambules.

20 Stories from The New Yorker

French Follies & Other Follies

"Portrays the life and literary career of Guillaume Apollinaire and discusses his friendships with artists including Picasso and Braque"--Amazon.com.

Apollinaire, Poet Among the Painters

Maupassant, a Lion in the Path

(Gustave Flaubert).

Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait

Examines the life, work, thought, and preoccupations, of the multi-talented artist against the age in which he flourished.

Cocteau, a Biography

This book is about the life of Jean Cocteau, a French poet, novelist, dramatist, playwright and filmmaker.

Cocteau: a Biography

The Love Story of Isadora Duncan & Gordon Craig

Your Isadora

A Comedy of Intrigue

Silence at Salerno

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

Shirley Hazzard

Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. The Ancient Shore collects the best of Hazzard’s writings on Naples, along with a classic New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in the present. With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and of course Goethe, but Hazzard’s concern is primarily with the Naples of our own time—often violently unforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor who attends patiently to its rhythms and history. A town shadowed by both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to acknowledge the essential precariousness of life—nor, as the lover of Naples discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and friendship that are necessary to sustain it. Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, The Ancient Shore is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted. “Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to a place, and a time, where ‘nothing was pristine, except the light.’”—Bookforum “Deep in the spell of Italy, Hazzard parses the difference between visiting and living and working in a foreign country. She writes with enormous eloquence and passion of the beauty of getting lost in a place.”—Susan Slater Reynolds, Los Angeles Times “The two voices join in exquisite harmony. . . . A lovely book.”—Booklist, starred review

Dispatches from Naples

The Ancient Shore

Let's Visit Belgium

A Sensibility on Tour; a Narrative Drawn from Gustave Flaubert's Travel Notes & Letters

Flaubert in Egypt

Collects essays and works in which the authors share their love of the city Naples.

Francis Steegmuller

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