Recommendations
Books Like Manon Lescaut
Best books to read after Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost
Abbé Prévost's founding French novel of fatal desire (1731) tells the story of the Chevalier des Grieux, who narrates his own ruin through love for the beautiful and unfaithful Manon with full retrospective awareness of his compulsion. The founding document of the French tradition of the desire novel, and the source for two great operas (Massenet, Puccini), Manon Lescaut has generated companions in every century of French and European fiction.
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La Princesse de Clèves
by Madame de Lafayette
The essential predecessor in the French tradition — Lafayette's analysis of a woman's desire at the court of Henri II is the foundational document of the psychological tradition Manon Lescaut belongs to, and the comparison shows how Prévost simplified and intensified the method.
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Adolphe
by Benjamin Constant
The direct successor in the French desire novel — Constant's retrospective analysis of an inability to love is the closest companion to Manon Lescaut in the tradition of the first-person confessional narrative of fatal passion, and shows what the nineteenth century did with Prévost's method.
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L'Éducation sentimentale
by Émile Flaubert
Flaubert's great novel of the educated young man's compulsive desire for an unattainable married woman is the fullest nineteenth-century development of the tradition Manon Lescaut begins — Frédéric's retrospective awareness of his own failure mirrors des Grieux's exactly, at much greater length.
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Carmen
by Prosper Mérimée
Mérimée's novella is the closest nineteenth-century parallel in form and theme — the soldier who narrates his ruin through love for the gypsy Carmen is the direct descendant of des Grieux narrating his ruin through love for Manon, and Bizet's opera of Carmen parallels the Massenet and Puccini operas of Manon.
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La Dame aux camélias
by Alexandre Dumas fils
The founding sentimental parallel — Dumas fils' story of Armand's love for the courtesan Marguerite Gautier (source of Verdi's La Traviata) is the most popular nineteenth-century French extension of the Manon Lescaut tradition: the man who loves the unattainable woman whose social role prevents their happiness.
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Chérie
by Edmond de Goncourt
The Goncourts' engagement with the tradition — Chérie's study of a young woman's interior life belongs to the French psychological tradition that Manon Lescaut inaugurates, and the comparison shows the tradition's development from the confessional first-person to the interior third-person.
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Les Liaisons dangereuses
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Laclos's great epistolary novel of desire and manipulation is the fullest eighteenth-century French engagement with sexuality and power — the Vicomte de Valmont's calculated pursuit of Madame de Tourvel is the most important eighteenth-century parallel to des Grieux's compulsive pursuit of Manon.
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Pierre et Jean
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's short psychological novel shows the French tradition's late-century development — the compressed, precise analysis of desire and its consequences in a bourgeois family is the closest formal parallel in the Naturalist period to Manon Lescaut's compression and precision.
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