Recommendations
Books Like Madame Gervaisais
Best books to read after Madame Gervaisais by the Goncourt brothers
The Goncourt brothers' most ambitious novel (1869) follows a cultured, agnostic Parisian widow who is gradually and totally absorbed into Catholicism during a stay in Rome — their fullest application of the documentary method to a bourgeois interior life, and the work Flaubert recognized as their masterpiece. Readers drawn to its portrait of a rational mind overcome by religious experience will find the richest companions in the French Naturalist tradition and in the literature of religious experience.
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Germinie Lacerteux
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The essential companion — the founding collaborative Naturalist novel, and the work that established the method that Madame Gervaisais applies to the bourgeois and Catholic milieu. Essential for understanding what Madame Gervaisais inherits from and adds to the Goncourt method.
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En Route
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Huysmans's 1895 novel of his own conversion experience — the most direct successor to Madame Gervaisais, which Huysmans explicitly acknowledged as a model. The comparison shows what the tradition of the Naturalist conversion novel became in the hands of the former Zola disciple.
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La Faute de l'abbé Mouret
by Émile Zola
Zola's most extreme engagement with Catholic mysticism — the story of the young priest Serge Mouret's destruction through love for Albine shows the Rougon-Macquart series' engagement with the same Catholicism that Madame Gervaisais documents from the convert's interior.
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À rebours
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Huysmans's 1884 Decadent novel — the spiritual exhaustion and aesthetic hyperaesthesia that À rebours documents is the precondition for the Catholic conversion that Madame Gervaisais anticipates and that En Route completes, and the trilogy shows the trajectory of the French Naturalist engagement with religion.
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Renée Mauperin
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The Goncourts' most accessible female portrait in the collaborative work — the contrast between Renée's vital bourgeois world and Madame Gervaisais's total religious absorption shows the range of the Goncourts' engagement with female consciousness and its possible fates.
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The Wings of the Dove
by Henry James
James's study of a refined consciousness destroyed by illness and social convention in Rome and Venice is the English-language parallel to Madame Gervaisais's portrait of a refined consciousness destroyed by religious absorption in Rome — the comparison shows the tradition's reach beyond the French.
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Chérie
by Edmond de Goncourt
Edmond's final solo novel — the interior study of an aristocratic girl's consciousness is the companion in method to Madame Gervaisais's study of a bourgeois woman's absorption by an external force, and the comparison shows the range of the Goncourts' engagement with female interior life.
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Charles Demailly
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The Goncourts' study of the artist destroyed by a woman who cannot understand him — the companion novel in which a man rather than a woman is absorbed and destroyed by a force that exceeds his understanding and his control.
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