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Books Like Renée Mauperin
Best books to read after Renée Mauperin by the Goncourts
If Renée Mauperin's portrait of the unconventional bourgeois young woman — her intelligence, her swimming, her speaking without self-censorship, and her destruction by the social consequences of a casual remark — engaged you, these eight novels share its territory: the French bourgeois family novel, the unconventional young woman destroyed by convention, and the Goncourt Naturalist tradition.
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Germinie Lacerteux
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The companion Goncourt novel published the same year — the most rigorous application of the same method to a different social class (the working-class servant) and a different kind of destruction (physiological-hereditary rather than social).
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Manette Salomon
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The Goncourts' later artistic-milieu novel and the most direct successor to Renée Mauperin's analytical intelligence about what social worlds do to individuals who don't fit their requirements.
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
The essential predecessor of the unconventional woman destroyed by bourgeois society: Emma Bovary's romantic aspiration is the mirror image of Renée Mauperin's critical intelligence, but both are destroyed by the same social mechanism.
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Une vie
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's first novel, set in the same Norman bourgeois world at the same period, studies a similar mechanism of a young woman's intelligence and aspiration being slowly ground down by the reality of bourgeois marriage and provincial life.
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Chopin's American parallel to the unconventional bourgeoise who cannot live within social convention: Edna Pontellier's awakening is the same process of self-discovery and its impossibility that Renée Mauperin experiences through the social rather than the erotic register.
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L'Éducation sentimentale
by Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert's study of the 1848 generation's failure to become what it aspired to is the essential French social novel of the same period, providing the male counterpart to Renée Mauperin's portrait of female aspiration in the same bourgeois world.
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Charles Demailly
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The companion Goncourt novel of the same period: where Renée Mauperin studies the bourgeois family world, Charles Demailly studies the literary world — the same analytical precision applied to a different social environment.
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's portrait of Dorothea Brooke, whose intelligence and unconventional ambitions cannot find adequate expression in the provincial bourgeois world she inhabits, is the English parallel to Renée Mauperin's situation — the same analysis of wasted potential, with more philosophical depth and greater scope.
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