Reading Order
Emmeline Reading Order
Emmeline (1837) by Alfred de Musset is the earliest of his full prose novellas — a story of a young woman, Emmeline, who is genuinely in love with a man named Burner but who allows herself to be maneuvered by the coquettish social world she inhabits into a series of misunderstandings that eventually drive Burner away. The story is an examination of the gap between genuine feeling and social performance — Emmeline's coquetry is not malicious but a learned social behaviour that she cannot switch off even when she genuinely wants to express her real feeling, and the result is that Burner reads her performance as her real self and takes her at social face value. The story is more straightforwardly realistic than the other Musset novellas and more interested in social mechanism — how the social world creates the gap between feeling and expression — and it anticipates some of the psychological realism of Flaubert's portraiture, though with a lighter touch and a less sardonic perspective.
Where to start
Emmeline is short (under 60 pages) and should be read as the first of Musset's major prose fiction works — it predates Les Deux Maîtresses by a few months and establishes the psychological territory that his prose fiction would explore throughout the period. Pair it with Les Deux Maîtresses for the complementary male perspective on the same problem of the gap between social performance and genuine feeling.
Complete Emmeline Book List
- 1Buy
Emmeline
Alfred de Musset·1837·Available in French in collections of Musset's prose (Nouvelles, GF Flammarion). Often the first work in collected editions of his novellas. - Buy
Les Deux Maîtresses
OptionalAlfred de Musset·1837·The companion prose fiction from the same year — the same psychological territory from the male perspective, where the gap between feeling and expression takes the form of indecision rather than coquetry.
Emmeline — Frequently Asked Questions
How does Emmeline's coquetry relate to the Romantic theme of sincerity?
Emmeline is a study in the impossibility of sincerity within a social world that has made performance the primary mode of interaction. Emmeline's problem is not that she is insincere — she has genuine feelings for Burner and wants to express them — but that she has so thoroughly internalized the social code of coquetry that she cannot act outside it even when she chooses to. The social code takes over at the moments when it matters most, and Burner, reading the social code rather than the genuine feeling behind it, responds to the performance rather than the reality. This connects Emmeline to the larger Romantic preoccupation with sincerity and authenticity — the anxiety that social forms have so thoroughly colonized genuine feeling that the genuine feeling can no longer be expressed, or even recognized. Musset's treatment is unusually sympathetic to Emmeline herself: unlike the protagonists of the Romantic tradition who destroy others through their self-absorption, Emmeline is the victim of a social mechanism she cannot escape, not a free agent who chooses self-deception.
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