Flaubert's letters

[2] His main correspondents include family members, business associates and fellow-writers such as Théophile Gautier, the Goncourt brothers, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, George Sand, Ivan Turgenev and Émile Zola.

They provide a valuable glimpse of his methods of work and his literary philosophy, as well as documenting his social life, political opinions, and increasing disgust with bourgeois society.

They discuss the subject-matter and structural difficulties of his novels, and explore the problems Flaubert faced in their composition, giving the reader a unique glimpse of his art in the making.

[13] They illustrate his extensive reading of the creative literatures of France, England (he loved Shakespeare, Byron and Dickens), Germany and the classical world; also his deep researches into history, philosophy and the sciences.

[26] Jean-Paul Sartre, an inveterate enemy of Flaubert's novels, considered the letters a perfect example of pre-Freudian free association, and for Julian Barnes this description "hints at their fluency, profligacy, range and sexual frankness; to which we should add power, control, wit, emotion and furious intelligence.

She continues, "Reading Flaubert's correspondence brings startlingly alive a man of enormous complexity, of remarkable appetites and debilitating lethargies, a knotted network of prejudices, insights, blind spots, passions and ambitions.