La Faustin Reading Order

La Faustin (1882) by Edmond de Goncourt is his study of the great actress — a character modeled partly on Sarah Bernhardt and Rachel, following the career of the actress Faustin from her origins in poverty through her achievement of the highest ranks of the Comédie-Française and her destruction by love for an English lord who dies of consumption while she watches. The novel is Edmond de Goncourt's most ambitious in its engagement with the performance milieu: the backstage world of the Comédie-Française in the 1870s and 1880s, its rehearsal methods, its internal politics, its relationships with critics and with audiences, are documented with the same research precision that the Goncourts brought to every social world they studied. La Faustin is also notable for its method of psychological analysis: Faustin's experience of acting (the way she uses her own emotional memory and emotional intelligence to generate the appearances of feeling on stage) is rendered with an interior access that anticipates later analyses of acting method. The actress as a figure of dangerous autonomous femininity — a woman whose professional power exceeds any of the social constraints the bourgeois world imposes — runs through the Goncourts' work from the actress who destroys Charles Demailly to La Faustin herself, and the novel is the fullest treatment of this recurring anxiety.