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Books Like L'Éducation sentimentale
Best books to read after L'Éducation sentimentale by Flaubert
Readers who respond to Frédéric Moreau's passive anti-heroism, Flaubert's anti-Romantic realism, and the novel's account of the 1848 Revolution seen through the eyes of a man incapable of being changed by it will find the wider tradition of European realist fiction.
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary (1857) is the essential companion to L'Éducation sentimentale: where Frédéric Moreau is passive and male, Emma Bovary is active and female, but both are destroyed by the gap between Romantic fantasy and provincial bourgeois reality that Flaubert identifies as the defining disease of his generation.
- 2Buy
The Way We Live Now
by Anthony Trollope
Trollope's great satirical novel of 1875 is the English equivalent of L'Éducation sentimentale's portrait of a society in which money has replaced all previous values: where Flaubert diagnoses the failure of the generation of 1848, Trollope diagnoses the failure of Victorian commercial society, with the same combination of precision and melancholy.
- 3Buy
A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
by Marcel Proust
Proust's great novel inherits Flaubert's methods for rendering the experience of love, time, and the social world: the Proustian technique of subjective time, involuntary memory, and the retrospective understanding of past experience is developed directly from Flaubert's techniques in L'Éducation sentimentale.
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Lost Illusions
by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's great novel of provincial ambition and Parisian disillusionment is the direct predecessor of L'Éducation sentimentale: Lucien de Rubempré makes the same journey from provincial dreams to Parisian reality that Frédéric Moreau makes, but with much more active self-destruction and much more dramatic failure.
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L'Assommoir
by Émile Zola
Zola's 1877 novel extended Flaubert's realist analysis to the working-class world that L'Éducation sentimentale's bourgeois perspective excluded: where Flaubert shows the bourgeois failure of the generation of 1848, Zola shows the working-class consequences of the same historical period.
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The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
The Red and the Black (1830) is the great French Romantic novel that L'Éducation sentimentale destroys: where Julien Sorel has the will and ambition that defines the Romantic hero, Frédéric Moreau has neither — and the comparison between Stendhal's active hero and Flaubert's passive one is a diagnosis of how French literature and French society changed between 1830 and 1869.
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Buddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
Mann's 1901 novel about the decline of a German merchant family over four generations is the German equivalent of L'Éducation sentimentale's portrait of a generation's failure: where Flaubert shows one man's inability to seize his moment, Mann shows an entire bourgeois family's historical decline through a series of such moments.
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The Europeans
by Henry James
James's early novel (1878) is a lighter treatment of the same cultural confrontation that L'Éducation sentimentale stages between Romantic idealism and bourgeois reality: the Europeans who arrive in New England with Old World sophistication are versions of the same mismatch between what the world promises and what it delivers.
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