Gustave Flaubert

A handful of novels that took upwards of five years each to write, the last of them left unfinished; a slim volume of short stories; tens of thousands of pages of notes, jottings and unfinished drafts; a large body of early works left unpublished during his lifetime; a massive correspondence that some (including Gide, who kept it at his bedside table in place of the Bible) see as his masterpiece; and an existence spent, for the most part, in the quiet seclusion of a large family house on the banks of the Seine near Rouen. The life and work of Flaubert can be summarized in relatively few words. Yet the “hermit of Croisset”, as he became known, occupies a unique place in literary history – and not only because of the famous trial in 1857 f