Recommendations
Books Like The Princess of Clèves
Best books to read after The Princess of Clèves by Madame de La Fayette
Madame de La Fayette's The Princess of Clèves is the first great French novel — a psychologically perfect short work about a court noblewoman who resists her passion and refuses to marry the man she loves even when all obstacles are removed. These recommendations extend the experience through the French psychological novel tradition and through fiction about self-mastery and the court world.
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Les Liaisons Dangereuses
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Laclos's 1782 epistolary masterpiece is the most important French novel between The Princess of Clèves and the nineteenth-century tradition — both novels are organized around the manipulation of passion at court, and both are psychologically precise about the relationship between public presentation and private feeling.
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert's 1857 novel is the ironic successor to The Princess of Clèves in the French tradition: where the Princess's problem is too much self-mastery (she refuses love even when it is available), Emma Bovary's problem is too little (she pursues romantic fantasy without sufficient self-awareness). Both novels are organized around the relationship between desire and reality.
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The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
Stendhal's psychological novel about Julien Sorel's calculation and passion is the nineteenth-century development of La Fayette's interest in the gap between performed emotion and actual feeling. Stendhal acknowledged La Fayette as a predecessor in the psychological French novel.
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Corneille: The Cid
by Pierre Corneille
Corneille's 1637 tragicomedy — in which honor, duty, and passion conflict in ways that make action impossible without sacrificing something essential — is the seventeenth-century dramatic analog to The Princess of Clèves's moral dilemma. Both are organized around the conflict between public duty and private desire.
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's Isabel Archer — who chooses her own destiny and is systematically destroyed by that choice — is the American psychological novel's version of the Princess's dilemma: a woman of great moral seriousness in collision with a world that does not accommodate her values. James acknowledged La Fayette as part of his tradition.
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The Golden Bowl
by Henry James
James's final major novel, in which Maggie Verver manages a marital crisis through silence, patience, and the careful control of what she acknowledges knowing, is the closest American equivalent to The Princess of Clèves's project — the management of passionate feeling through deliberate self-mastery.
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Dangerous Liaisons
by Christopher Hampton
Hampton's stage adaptation is the most direct examination of what happens to the court world of The Princess of Clèves when the moral restraint is removed — the same milieu, the same epistolary intelligence, but applied to predation rather than to self-mastery.
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Dorothea Brooke — who sacrifices her own happiness to an ideal of duty and service, and whose 'unhistoric acts' shape the world quietly without recognition — is the Victorian English counterpart to the Princess of Clèves: a woman of great moral seriousness who refuses the easier path.
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