Recommendations
Books Like A Life (Une Vie)
Best books to read after A Life (Une Vie) by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's first novel (1883) follows Jeanne de Lamare, a young aristocratic woman in Normandy, as her marriage and her life are systematically destroyed by her husband's infidelities and her son's selfishness. These recommendations extend the experience through Maupassant's other work, through other French and Victorian novels about women's constrained lives, and through fiction that portrays the destruction of romantic illusions with the same unsentimental honesty.
- 1Buy
Pierre and Jean
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's finest novel (1888) and the essential companion to Une Vie: where A Life follows a woman destroyed by forty years of accumulated disappointment, Pierre and Jean is a short, concentrated study of two brothers destroyed by a single revelation. Both novels demonstrate Maupassant's gift for precisely calibrated psychological suffering and for Normandy settings of coastal melancholy.
- 2Buy
Bel-Ami
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's most popular novel (1885) and the tonal opposite of Une Vie: where A Life shows a good woman destroyed by selfish men, Bel-Ami follows a selfish man's rise through Parisian society by exploiting women. Reading Bel-Ami alongside Une Vie gives you the full moral landscape of Maupassant's fiction — the destroyer and the destroyed.
- 3Buy
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
The immediate literary predecessor and the novel Une Vie most directly responds to: Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Maupassant's Jeanne de Lamare are both Norman women destroyed by the gap between their romantic expectations and the reality of their marriages — but where Emma is complicit in her own destruction, Jeanne is simply outmatched by the indifference of those around her.
- 4Buy
The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
The English equivalent of Une Vie: the story of Maggie Tulliver, a woman of exceptional intelligence and feeling constrained by the limited expectations of her provincial community, and destroyed by the same combination of passion and the world's indifference that destroys Jeanne. Both novels are elegies for the women their societies failed.
- 5Buy
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
The American equivalent of Une Vie: Lily Bart's slow destruction at the hands of a society that values beauty and social position over character parallels Jeanne's destruction at the hands of people who value their own comfort over her happiness. Both novels are precise, unsentimental accounts of what happens when goodness and intelligence are not enough.
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Effi Briest
by Theodor Fontane
The German equivalent of both Madame Bovary and Une Vie: the story of a young aristocratic woman in Prussia whose youthful marriage to a much older man ends in scandal, exile from her daughter, and early death. Fontane's Effi is the closest German parallel to Jeanne de Lamare — both novels show how completely the nineteenth-century social order could destroy the women who failed to conform to its requirements.
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Thérèse Raquin
by Émile Zola
Zola's early psychological novel shows the same interest in women's destruction in naturalist fiction as Maupassant's Une Vie, but from a completely different angle: where Jeanne is passive and destroyed by others, Thérèse is active and destroys herself through her own desires and guilt. Both novels are studies in the varieties of female suffering available to nineteenth-century fiction.
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
The American naturalist novel that most directly parallels Une Vie's portrait of a woman who discovers she cannot be what the social world requires of her: Edna Pontellier's awakening to her own desires parallels Jeanne's gradual awakening to the narrowness of the life she has been given. Both novels end in a kind of extinction — Edna's in death, Jeanne's in a desiccated survival.
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