Sentimental Education

In 1840 eighteen-year-old Frédéric Moreau, on a river boat to his provincial home, sees Madame Arnoux, the wife of an art dealer, and falls in love for life. Over the next decade in Paris he drifts between her, a courtesan and a wealthy widow, between friends who become revolutionaries and careerists, while the revolution of 1848 rises and fails around him.

Published in 1869, Sentimental Education is Flaubert's portrait of his own generation and of a young man who never quite acts, and it draws on his youthful love for an older married woman. Less dramatic than Madame Bovary, it is admired by many writers as his greatest novel.

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), the son of a surgeon in Rouen, gave up studying law after a nervous illness and spent most of his life at his family's house at Croisset on the Seine. In 1849 he travelled for nearly two years through Egypt and the Middle East, a journey whose colours run through Salammbô.

He worked for years on each book, shouting his sentences aloud to test them, in search of the exact word. Madame Bovary brought him a trial and fame, and Sentimental Education followed. He was a mentor to Maupassant and a friend of Turgenev.