A Sentimental Education

The story of a literary friendship between a celebrated French writer and a forgotten feminist critic that explores the stirring nineteenth-century debates around art and politics

Part literary biography, part feminist criticism, and part history of ideas, this book tells the story of the tumultuous friendship of Amelie Bosquet (1815-1904) and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) through their lively, biting, and often ardent letters.

The pair had many parallels: Both were both born in Rouen, and both moved to Paris chasing dreams of literary celebrity. Both wrote novels set during France's waves of revolution, and both dissected bourgeois mores. The elite, famous Flaubert initially served as a mentor to the poorer Bosquet, and they became dedicated, intimate correspondents in the early 1860s. Yet they were often at odds: Flaubert famously argued that art ought to be devoid of politics while Bosquet, a socialist-feminist activist, insisted that all art was political. This disagreement-and the rift over Flaubert's portrayal of women in Sentimental Education (1869)-would end their friendship.

Victoria Baena taps a largely unpublished and untranslated archive to recount the story of this lively, asymmetrical friendship, illuminating the roiling world of nineteenth-century France, the development of the modern novel, and the birth of modern feminism.