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Books Like Chérie
Best books to read after Chérie by Edmond de Goncourt
Edmond de Goncourt's final novel (1884) is his most intimate: an interior study of the consciousness of an aristocratic girl, Chérie Haudancourt, from birth to her death from nervous disorder. His most extreme application of écriture artiste, the novel anticipates the psychological novel's interior method and influenced Proust directly. Readers drawn to its interiority and its portrait of a young woman's inner life will find the most important companions in the Goncourts' collaborative work and in the tradition of the French psychological novel.
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Renée Mauperin
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The earlier and more fully realized Goncourt portrait of a young woman — Renée Mauperin is the essential comparison for understanding what Chérie adds to the method, and the more accessible starting point for readers new to the Goncourts' engagement with female consciousness.
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Germinie Lacerteux
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The Goncourts' founding collaborative novel of female consciousness — the study of a servant's hidden life of desire and disorder is the most important predecessor for understanding Chérie's method, applied here to an aristocratic rather than a working-class subject.
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La Faustin
by Edmond de Goncourt
The companion solo novel — the actress's professional consciousness rather than the aristocratic girl's interior life, but the same engagement with the interiority of female experience that Chérie develops in its most extreme form.
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Adolphe
by Benjamin Constant
The founding French novel of the interior analysis of passion — Constant's retrospective analysis of an inability to love is the most important predecessor in the tradition of the French psychological novel that Chérie's method belongs to.
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La Princesse de Clèves
by Madame de Lafayette
The founding text of the French psychological novel — Lafayette's analysis of a woman's desire is the originary document of the tradition Chérie develops in its most interiorized form, and the comparison shows the method's continuity across two centuries.
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À la recherche du temps perdu
by Marcel Proust
Proust's great novel of interior consciousness is the fullest realization of the method Chérie attempts — Edmond de Goncourt appears as a character in Le Temps retrouvé, and the influence of the Goncourts' écriture artiste on Proust's method is direct and acknowledged.
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Une Vie
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's novel of a woman's interior experience — the study of Jeanne's entire life from her wedding to her old age is the closest parallel in the Naturalist tradition to Chérie's ambition to render the full arc of a female consciousness.
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Chopin's American parallel — Edna Pontellier's interior awakening and its tragic consequences show the same concern with female consciousness, desire, and the impossibility of its fulfillment that Chérie develops in the French aristocratic world.
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