Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait Paperback - 2004

First line

ONE morning in May 1845, a handsome, blond, English-looking young Frenchman was standing in the picture gallery of the Palazzo Balbi-Senarega at Genoa.

Media reviews

"This is the best biography of a novelist I have come across." Anne Enright in O, The Oprah Magazine"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

"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

"Flaubert and Madame Bovary 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."
— Katherine Woods, The New York Times