Recommendations
Books Like Dominique
Best books to read after Dominique by Eugène Fromentin
Readers who respond to Dominique's elegiac renunciation of Romantic love, its portrait of the Charente landscape, and its position as the last great French Romantic novel will find the wider tradition of late Romantic introspective fiction.
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Adolphe
by Benjamin Constant
Adolphe is the most direct ancestor of Dominique in the French Romantic tradition: both novels analyze with surgical precision the love that a man feels but cannot sustain, and both end in the woman's destruction and the man's survival, scarred and diminished.
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Volupté
by Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Volupté (1834) is the closest sibling of Dominique (1863) in the French Romantic tradition of introspective fiction: both are retrospective memoirs told by men who renounced an impossible love and found peace in a different kind of life — Amaury in the priesthood, Dominique in his Charente estate.
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Oberman
by Étienne Pivert de Sénancour
Oberman is the most philosophically radical of the texts in Dominique's tradition: where Dominique achieves a kind of secular peace through retirement and provincial management, Oberman simply continues in his incapacity — making Sénancour's novel the more honest and Fromentin's the more consoled of the two.
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L'Éducation sentimentale
by Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert published L'Éducation sentimentale six years after Dominique, and it is the novel that definitively ended the tradition Dominique represents: where Dominique achieves a kind of peace through renunciation, Frédéric Moreau achieves nothing — he simply continues, indifferent and undamaged.
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Masters of Past Time
by Eugène Fromentin
Fromentin's art criticism (1876, on Dutch and Flemish painting) is the essential companion to Dominique: the painter's eye that produces the Charente landscape descriptions in the novel is the same eye that analyzes Rembrandt and Vermeer in the criticism, and reading both texts together shows the unity of Fromentin's vision across media.
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The Marble Faun
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hawthorne's 1860 novel, published three years before Dominique, shares the same concern with the romantic experience that must be renounced for the ordinary life to be possible: Donatello's loss of innocence through love and violence is the American equivalent of the French Romantic problem that Fromentin's novel addresses.
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The Ambassadors
by Henry James
James's 1903 novel is often read as the late English-language treatment of the same theme that Dominique addresses: a man who realizes, retrospectively, that he has lived the wrong life and that the moment for the right one has passed — Lambert Strether's Paris education is the American-in-Europe version of Dominique's retrospective renunciation.
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A Sentimental Journey
by Laurence Sterne
Sterne's 1768 travel narrative is the eighteenth-century English equivalent of the Romantic introspective tradition that Dominique inherits: the 'sentimental' in Sterne's title names the same cultivated emotional sensitivity — the capacity to feel the world through its effects on the self — that characterizes Fromentin's Dominique.
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