Gustave Flaubert: Style, Realism & Madame Bovary

Born on December 12, 1821, Gustave Flaubert became one of the great craftsmen of the nineteenth-century novel. He published relatively few books, wrote with agonizing slowness, and could spend enormous amounts of time struggling over a single passage. Yet that relentless attention to language helped transform modern fiction.

Flaubert is most closely associated with Madame Bovary, the story of a provincial woman whose dreams of romance and luxury collide painfully with the limitations of her life. The novel shocked some contemporary readers, led to a famous obscenity trial, and eventually became one of the most influential works in European literature.

But Flaubert’s career extended well beyond Emma Bovary. He recreated ancient Carthage in Salammbô, explored revolution and disappointed idealism in Sentimental Education, spent decades returning to The Temptation of Saint Anthony, produced the beautifully controlled Three Tales, and died while working on the satirical Bouvard and Pécuchet.

On December 12, his birthday offers a fitting reason to remember a writer who believed that how a sentence was written mattered just as much as what it said.

🏥 Growing Up in Rouen

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen, Normandy, into a family closely connected with medicine. His father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, was a prominent surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, and the family lived within the hospital complex.

That environment gave the young Flaubert an unusually close view of illness, suffering, medical practice, and death. Later critics have often connected his upbringing with the detached observational quality that became characteristic of his fiction. Flaubert could examine human behavior with something approaching a clinician’s attention, noticing contradiction, self-deception, physical detail, and the distance between what people imagine themselves to be and what they actually do.

He began writing while still very young. Like many adolescent writers of his generation, he was deeply influenced by Romanticism and filled notebooks with stories, plays, and dramatic visions. The young man who would later become famous for his severe control of prose began as an imaginative and often extravagant literary dreamer.

That Romantic imagination never disappeared entirely. Much of Flaubert’s career would be shaped by the tension between extravagant dreams and stubborn reality.

📚 A Young Writer Before He Was a Novelist

Flaubert attended school in Rouen and developed an early fascination with literature. He read voraciously and began producing his own work long before publication seemed realistic.

As a teenager, he encountered Élisa Schlesinger, an older married woman whom he idealized for years afterward. The emotional memory of that attachment became one of several experiences transformed through his fiction, particularly in the different versions of Sentimental Education.

This was a pattern that would recur throughout Flaubert’s career. Personal experience might provide the initial spark, but he rarely transferred life directly onto the page. Memory had to be reshaped through art.

Flaubert was already learning that lived experience and fiction were not the same thing.

Literature required transformation.

⚖️ Studying Law in Paris

After completing his studies in Rouen, Flaubert went to Paris to study law.

He was not enthusiastic.

The legal profession held little attraction for someone increasingly convinced that literature should occupy the center of his life. Paris nevertheless gave him access to writers, artists, theaters, political conversation, and a broader intellectual world.

During this period, Flaubert also met Maxime Du Camp, who would become an important friend and traveling companion.

His legal career never truly began. During the 1840s, Flaubert experienced serious episodes of illness often described as nervous or neurological attacks. He abandoned his legal studies and eventually withdrew from the kind of professional life his family might once have imagined for him.

What could have appeared to be a setback gave Flaubert something he desperately wanted.

Time to write.

🏡 Croisset

Flaubert settled into a life centered largely around the family property at Croisset, near Rouen on the Seine.

Croisset became inseparable from his literary identity.

He was not a hermit in any absolute sense. Flaubert traveled, maintained intense friendships, visited Paris, entertained writers, and carried on vast correspondences. Yet the daily work of writing usually took place in comparative isolation.

His literary routine became legendary.

Flaubert revised relentlessly. He read passages aloud to test their rhythm and sound. He distrusted easy phrases and clichés. He wanted sentences in which every word seemed necessary.

The popular image of Flaubert searching endlessly for le mot juste—the precise word—captures something essential about his method, even if it risks making writing sound more mechanical than it was.

For Flaubert, prose had music.

A sentence had to sound right as well as mean the right thing.

✍️ The Agony of Style

Flaubert did not write quickly and then polish casually afterward.

Revision was writing.

He could spend days on passages that readers might move through in seconds. Letters to friends reveal repeated complaints about the difficulty of his work, the slowness of his progress, and the physical exhaustion involved in getting prose to satisfy him.

Yet this obsessive labor produced writing that can feel remarkably effortless.

That is one of the paradoxes of literary style.

The reader experiences fluidity.

The writer may have reached it through struggle.

Flaubert wanted the author’s technique to disappear into the finished work. Rather than constantly explaining what readers should think about characters, he developed methods that allowed details, dialogue, rhythm, irony, and shifts in perspective to reveal them.

That approach would have an enormous influence on later fiction.

🌍 Traveling With Maxime Du Camp

Before beginning the book that would make him famous, Flaubert traveled extensively with Maxime Du Camp.

The two men journeyed through Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy between 1849 and 1851. Du Camp photographed monuments and landscapes while Flaubert recorded impressions in notebooks and letters.

The journey gave Flaubert a vast store of visual and sensory material.

Cairo, the Nile, deserts, ruins, ancient temples, markets, religious sites, Mediterranean landscapes, and unfamiliar customs all entered his imagination. Some of those experiences later contributed to the world of Salammbô and to his continuing fascination with antiquity and religion.

Travel also sharpened something already present in Flaubert’s personality: his habit of observing both magnificence and absurdity at the same time.

He could be overwhelmed by beauty while remaining acutely aware of human foolishness.

📖 The Long Road to Madame Bovary

After returning to France, Flaubert began work on the novel that would transform his career.

Madame Bovary grew slowly.

Flaubert spent roughly five years working on the book, submitting page after page to the demands of his exacting style.

Its basic story seems simple. Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary, a well-meaning but ordinary country doctor. Emma has absorbed romantic ideas about love, excitement, luxury, and passion from books, and she quickly becomes dissatisfied with provincial married life.

She wants more.

More beauty.

More passion.

More status.

More excitement.

Her attempts to find those things lead to affairs, debt, deception, and eventually catastrophe.

Yet the greatness of the novel lies less in the outline of the plot than in the way Flaubert tells it.

👩 Emma Bovary

Emma Bovary is one of literature’s most discussed characters because Flaubert refuses to tell readers exactly how they should feel about her.

She can be selfish.

She can be foolish.

She can be cruel.

She can also be lonely, trapped, imaginative, desperate, and painfully aware that the life she possesses bears little resemblance to the life she has been taught to desire.

Flaubert allows all of those qualities to coexist.

Emma is neither simply a victim nor simply the architect of her own destruction.

Her tragedy emerges from the interaction between personality and environment. She possesses desires that her world cannot easily satisfy, yet many of those desires have themselves been manufactured by romantic fiction, social aspiration, consumer culture, and fantasy.

Emma dreams constantly.

Reality keeps sending bills.

💭 Romance Versus Reality

The conflict between romantic dreams and disappointing reality runs throughout Madame Bovary.

Emma imagines passion in language borrowed from novels.

Marriage fails to resemble the romances she has read.

Her lovers fail to resemble the lovers she imagines.

Material possessions promise transformation but instead deepen her debt.

Even dramatic experiences can disappoint because Emma has already imagined more perfect versions of them.

Flaubert’s satire can be sharp, but it is not directed only at Emma.

The entire society around her is filled with cliché and self-deception.

Charles misunderstands his wife.

The pharmacist Homais is vain and self-important.

Rodolphe turns seduction into routine.

Lheureux understands exactly how desire can be converted into debt.

Almost everyone believes a flattering story about themselves.

Flaubert lets readers see the gap.

🗣️ Free Indirect Style and the Modern Novel

One of Flaubert’s greatest contributions to fiction involved the way narration could move between an external narrator and a character’s inner language.

A passage may appear to be narrated objectively, yet gradually begin reflecting Emma’s assumptions, vocabulary, expectations, or fantasies without formally announcing that the perspective has changed.

This technique is often discussed as free indirect discourse or free indirect style.

Flaubert was not the first writer ever to use anything resembling it, but his extraordinary control of the technique made Madame Bovary hugely influential.

The result creates a fascinating ambiguity.

Whose words are these?

Does the narrator believe this?

Does Emma?

Is the sentence sincere?

Is it ironic?

Later novelists would build entire careers around similar shifts in consciousness.

Flaubert helped make the border between narrator and character far more fluid.

📰 Serialization and Scandal

Madame Bovary first appeared in installments in La Revue de Paris in 1856.

Almost immediately, controversy followed.

French authorities charged Flaubert, the magazine’s editor, and its printer with offenses against public morality and religion. The prosecution focused particularly on the novel’s treatment of adultery and what authorities considered its insufficient moral condemnation of Emma’s behavior.

The trial took place in early 1857.

The prosecution argued that literature had responsibilities to public morality.

Flaubert’s defense argued that the novel did not glorify Emma’s actions but demonstrated their disastrous consequences.

The court acquitted Flaubert and his co-defendants.

Ironically, the prosecution helped make Madame Bovary famous.

⚖️ The Madame Bovary Trial

The trial offers an illuminating glimpse into nineteenth-century anxieties about fiction.

The problem was not merely that Emma commits adultery.

Literature had represented adultery before.

What disturbed authorities was partly Flaubert’s refusal to place an obvious moral lecturer beside Emma explaining what readers should think.

The novel’s detached style made interpretation more complicated.

Flaubert believed art should not constantly interrupt itself to preach.

That artistic principle became legally significant.

If the narrator did not openly condemn Emma at every stage, did that mean the book approved of her?

The court ultimately decided there was insufficient basis for conviction, although its judgment still criticized portions of the novel.

The controversy ensured that readers wanted to see the supposedly dangerous book for themselves.

📕 A Literary Sensation

When Madame Bovary appeared in book form in 1857, Flaubert suddenly possessed the fame that years of painstaking work had not guaranteed.

Readers argued about Emma.

Critics argued about realism.

Moralists argued about the novel’s influence.

Writers noticed the precision of the prose.

Flaubert, meanwhile, was already moving toward a completely different project.

Rather than producing another contemporary provincial novel designed to repeat his success, he turned toward ancient history.

It was a characteristically Flaubertian choice.

🏺 Salammbô

Flaubert’s next major novel, Salammbô, appeared in 1862.

Set in ancient Carthage after the First Punic War, the book could hardly seem further removed from provincial Normandy.

Flaubert buried himself in historical and archaeological research. He traveled to Tunisia in 1858 to examine the landscape associated with ancient Carthage and sought to reconstruct a world that had disappeared more than two thousand years earlier.

The result is lush, violent, exotic, and deliberately overwhelming.

Where Madame Bovary examines the oppressive ordinariness of provincial life, Salammbô plunges into armies, temples, religious rituals, mercenaries, political struggle, luxury, bloodshed, and ancient spectacle.

Yet the two books share an underlying principle.

Flaubert wanted exactness.

Whether describing a pharmacist’s shop in Normandy or a ceremony in ancient Carthage, he researched relentlessly.

🔍 The Novelist as Researcher

Flaubert treated research as an essential part of artistic creation.

For Salammbô, that meant archaeology and ancient sources.

For Sentimental Education, it meant reconstructing the physical and social world of Paris surrounding the Revolution of 1848.

For Bouvard and Pécuchet, his final unfinished project, it meant reading enormous quantities of material across fields ranging from agriculture and medicine to history, education, religion, and science.

This appetite for information did not make Flaubert a purely documentary novelist.

Facts were raw materials.

Once gathered, they had to disappear into style.

Research should make the fictional world convincing without turning the novel into a lecture.

🏙️ Sentimental Education

Flaubert returned to contemporary society with Sentimental Education, published in 1869.

The novel follows Frédéric Moreau, a young man filled with aspirations but remarkably skilled at failing to act decisively upon them.

Frédéric dreams of love, success, social importance, and a more significant life. He becomes obsessed with the married Madame Arnoux while drifting among friendships, political upheavals, financial possibilities, romantic entanglements, and the events surrounding the Revolution of 1848.

Like Emma Bovary, Frédéric wants reality to satisfy expectations created elsewhere.

It repeatedly fails.

But unlike a conventional coming-of-age protagonist, Frédéric does not steadily mature toward a grand achievement.

Life happens.

Opportunities appear.

He hesitates.

History moves around him.

The result is one of literature’s great novels of disappointment.

🏛️ History Without Heroes

Sentimental Education is particularly striking because enormous historical events occur without turning its protagonist into a hero.

Revolution fills the streets of Paris.

Governments fall.

Political movements rise.

Crowds act.

People die.

Yet Frédéric continues worrying about love, money, social standing, and personal frustrations.

That contrast gives the novel much of its modern quality.

Historical events may appear enormous in retrospect, but individuals living through them still have appointments, jealousies, financial problems, romantic obsessions, and private distractions.

Flaubert refuses to organize history neatly around his protagonist.

Frédéric is simply one person being carried through it.

🤝 George Sand

One of the most important friendships of Flaubert’s later life was with the novelist George Sand.

The pairing was fascinating because their temperaments and artistic philosophies differed considerably.

Sand tended to possess greater faith in people, political progress, and literature’s ability to communicate directly with readers. Flaubert was more pessimistic and more devoted to an impersonal conception of artistic style.

Yet they became deeply affectionate friends.

Their extensive correspondence records discussions about art, politics, writing, friendship, theater, illness, daily life, and the responsibilities of the novelist.

The letters reveal a Flaubert very different from the cold observer readers might imagine from his fiction.

He could be exuberant, funny, affectionate, furious, theatrical, vulnerable, and deeply loyal.

✉️ Flaubert the Letter Writer

Flaubert’s correspondence has become an important part of his literary legacy.

His letters allow readers to observe the work behind the finished books.

He complains about sentences.

Celebrates friends.

Attacks stupidity.

Discusses books.

Reports on research.

Describes travel.

Worries about money.

Expresses frustration with politics.

And repeatedly explains the artistic standards he has imposed on himself.

The contrast with the fiction is striking.

In his novels, Flaubert worked to suppress the obvious authorial personality.

In his letters, personality spills everywhere.

Together, the two bodies of writing reveal the discipline involved in creating his famous narrative distance.

Flaubert was not naturally emotionless.

He worked hard to keep the novelist from overwhelming the novel.

🐻 Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant

Flaubert also became an important mentor to the young Guy de Maupassant.

Maupassant’s family had connections with Flaubert, and the older writer took a serious interest in his development. He encouraged the younger man’s writing and introduced him to prominent literary figures.

The relationship helped transmit Flaubert’s demanding standards to another generation.

Maupassant would eventually become one of the great masters of the short story, famous for disciplined structure, economy, observation, and irony.

He did not write exactly like Flaubert.

But the importance of careful seeing and careful language was an inheritance worth carrying forward.

😈 The Temptation of Saint Anthony

Few works occupied Flaubert for as long as The Temptation of Saint Anthony.

He returned repeatedly to the story of Saint Anthony in the desert confronted by visions, temptations, religious figures, monsters, philosophical ideas, gods, and competing beliefs.

The work allowed Flaubert to indulge the extravagant, visionary side of his imagination that Madame Bovary had forced under severe discipline.

Earlier versions dissatisfied him, but he kept returning to the project across decades.

A definitive version finally appeared in 1874.

The persistence is revealing.

Flaubert could abandon a career in law.

He could reject manuscripts.

He could rewrite entire books.

But certain imaginative obsessions simply refused to leave him.

📚 Three Tales

In 1877, Flaubert published Three Tales, containing “A Simple Heart,” “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller,” and “Herodias.”

The collection demonstrates his extraordinary range in compact form.

“A Simple Heart” follows Félicité, a servant whose apparently ordinary life contains loyalty, grief, religious devotion, and a deep capacity for attachment. “Saint Julian” transforms medieval legend into a tale of violence, guilt, penance, and redemption. “Herodias” returns to the ancient world through the biblical story surrounding the death of John the Baptist.

The three stories move between nineteenth-century Normandy, medieval legend, and biblical antiquity.

Yet each receives the same level of attention.

Flaubert did not believe some subjects deserved beautiful writing while others did not.

A servant’s kitchen could receive as much artistic seriousness as a palace.

❤️ “A Simple Heart”

“A Simple Heart” is especially important because it complicates the common image of Flaubert as detached or cynical.

Félicité possesses little education or social power. She spends much of her life serving other people and repeatedly experiences loss.

Flaubert never turns her into an object of ridicule.

Instead, her emotional attachments become the center of the story.

Her devotion eventually focuses on her parrot, Loulou, whose significance grows increasingly complicated as memory, religion, loneliness, and affection converge.

The story can be funny and strange.

It is also profoundly compassionate.

Flaubert’s irony did not prevent tenderness.

The two could exist in the same work.

🦜 The Importance of Ordinary Objects

Flaubert understood the power of objects.

A hat.

A bouquet.

A carriage.

A piece of furniture.

A religious image.

A parrot.

Material things in his fiction are rarely mere decoration.

They reveal aspiration, taste, memory, class, sentiment, vanity, commercial desire, and self-deception.

This attention to objects became enormously important for later realist fiction.

People often reveal themselves through what they own, purchase, display, preserve, or desire.

Emma Bovary’s possessions help create her ruin because buying objects becomes another way of trying to purchase the life she imagines she deserves.

Flaubert turns material culture into psychology.

🛍️ Desire and Consumer Culture

This aspect of Madame Bovary feels particularly modern.

Emma is not merely seduced by people.

She is seduced by lifestyles.

Clothing, interiors, travel, elegant objects, fashionable experiences, and luxurious surroundings seem to promise access to another version of herself.

Lheureux, the merchant who extends credit to her, understands this perfectly.

Consumption becomes a form of fantasy.

The bill arrives later.

Flaubert was writing in the nineteenth century, but the mechanism remains recognizable. Advertising and consumer culture continually suggest that the right object might transform identity.

Emma keeps trying.

The transformation never lasts.

🤦 The War Against Cliché

Flaubert was fascinated by cliché.

He noticed how often people repeat ideas they have not seriously examined, rely upon fashionable opinions, and mistake familiar phrases for original thought.

This concern runs throughout his fiction and correspondence and eventually became central to Bouvard and Pécuchet and the related Dictionary of Received Ideas.

Flaubert’s characters frequently speak in borrowed language.

Their clichés reveal them.

The irony is subtle because Flaubert rarely steps in to announce that a statement is foolish.

He lets the words expose themselves.

This remains one of his most influential techniques.

Bad thinking often arrives in perfectly respectable sentences.

👬 Bouvard and Pécuchet

Flaubert’s final major project was Bouvard and Pécuchet, a vast comic novel about two Parisian copy clerks who become friends, inherit enough money to retire, move to the countryside, and begin attempting to master one field of knowledge after another.

Agriculture.

Chemistry.

Medicine.

History.

Archaeology.

Literature.

Politics.

Education.

Religion.

Again and again, they read authoritative books, attempt to apply what they have learned, encounter contradictions, and fail spectacularly.

The premise allowed Flaubert to satirize not knowledge itself but the human desire to acquire certainty through formulas.

The project required staggering amounts of reading.

To write convincingly about people drowning in information, Flaubert nearly drowned himself in information first.

📖 The Dictionary of Received Ideas

Connected with Bouvard and Pécuchet was Flaubert’s fascination with cataloging clichés and conventional opinions.

The Dictionary of Received Ideas collects the kinds of automatic statements respectable people repeat because everyone else seems to believe them.

Its entries reveal how social thought can become mechanical.

Certain artists must be admired.

Certain professions must be mocked.

Certain political opinions are obligatory.

Certain historical figures require predictable reactions.

The project feels startlingly contemporary because received ideas have hardly disappeared.

They simply travel faster.

Flaubert recognized that cliché is not merely a problem of bad writing.

It is a problem of thought.

🧱 Realism — With Complications

Flaubert is routinely described as one of the great masters of literary realism.

The label is useful, but incomplete.

Certainly he observed social life with extraordinary precision. Madame Bovary contains recognizable provincial institutions, professions, objects, commercial practices, social hierarchies, and routines.

Yet Flaubert also wrote extravagant historical fiction, religious visions, legends, grotesque comedy, and works filled with dreamlike imagery.

His real commitment was not to ordinary subject matter.

It was to artistic exactness.

A hallucination deserved precision.

So did a dinner table.

Ancient Carthage and a Normandy village were equally legitimate subjects if the writer could make them convincing.

🎼 Prose as Music

Perhaps the best way to understand Flaubert’s style is to remember how much he cared about sound.

He famously tested his prose by reading it aloud, sometimes forcefully, to determine whether the rhythm worked.

Language had physical qualities.

A sentence could drag.

A phrase could clash.

Repeated sounds could irritate.

A paragraph could lose balance.

Meaning alone was not enough.

This concern helps explain why translating Flaubert presents such difficulty.

A translator must transfer information and tone while somehow recreating prose whose rhythm mattered enormously in the original French.

Every translation becomes another attempt at the same impossible problem Flaubert gave himself.

Finding the right words.

🕯️ Loss and Financial Trouble

Flaubert’s later years became increasingly difficult.

Friends died.

His mother died in 1872.

The Franco-Prussian War and occupation deeply distressed him, and Croisset itself was affected by the upheaval surrounding the conflict.

Financial problems also entered his life when difficulties involving his niece Caroline’s family placed serious strain on his resources.

The writer who had spent much of his adult life sheltered from ordinary professional employment found himself confronting practical worries he would rather have avoided.

Yet he continued working.

The unfinished Bouvard and Pécuchet grew from these difficult years.

Flaubert’s standards did not become easier simply because life became harder.

🕯️ Flaubert’s Final Days

Gustave Flaubert died at Croisset on May 8, 1880.

He was 58 years old.

At the time of his death, Bouvard and Pécuchet remained unfinished. The novel was published posthumously in 1881.

His death ended a career that was relatively small when measured simply by the number of completed major books.

But quantity is a poor way to measure Flaubert.

Each major work attempted something different.

Madame Bovary transformed the novel of provincial life.

Salammbô reconstructed antiquity.

Sentimental Education turned political history into a study of personal drift and disappointment.

Three Tales compressed his range into three radically different narratives.

Bouvard and Pécuchet turned the accumulation of knowledge into comedy.

The books were few.

Their influence was enormous.

📚 Flaubert’s Influence on Modern Fiction

Later novelists repeatedly returned to Flaubert.

His careful control of point of view influenced the development of modern narrative technique. His use of free indirect discourse helped writers move more subtly between narration and consciousness. His emphasis on style elevated prose craftsmanship into something approaching an ethical obligation.

Writers as different as Guy de Maupassant, Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and many others worked within a literary world Flaubert helped create.

Not all admired everything about him.

Influence rarely requires imitation.

What mattered was the standard he established.

The novel could be constructed with the same degree of formal attention expected of poetry.

Every sentence mattered.

🌟 Why Gustave Flaubert Still Matters

Flaubert remains relevant because the human weaknesses he examined have not disappeared.

People still want lives that look more exciting from the outside.

They still mistake consumption for transformation.

They still repeat opinions because those opinions sound respectable.

They still build identities from borrowed ideas.

They still imagine that somewhere else, with someone else, under different circumstances, existence would finally become what it was supposed to be.

Emma Bovary remains recognizable because dissatisfaction remains recognizable.

Frédéric Moreau remains recognizable because indecision remains recognizable.

Bouvard and Pécuchet remain recognizable because information does not automatically produce wisdom.

Flaubert’s nineteenth century is gone.

The mechanisms of self-deception survive remarkably well.

🎂 Remembering Gustave Flaubert on His Birthday

December 12 offers a fitting opportunity to return to Gustave Flaubert and a career built around the stubborn belief that writing deserved extraordinary care.

He grew up beside a hospital in Rouen, studied law without wanting to become a lawyer, withdrew to Croisset, traveled through Egypt and the Mediterranean, and then spent years laboring over the story of an unhappy provincial woman.

That book put him on trial.

It also made him famous.

Flaubert could have repeated the formula. Instead, he moved to ancient Carthage, then revolutionary Paris, then religious vision, medieval legend, biblical history, and finally an enormous satire about two men attempting to understand everything.

Across all of those subjects, the standard remained the same. Language had to be precise enough to disappear into the work.

Flaubert is sometimes remembered as the tormented perfectionist endlessly searching for the right word. There is truth in that image, but it can make him seem more solemn than his fiction actually is.

He was also extremely funny.

He understood vanity.

He understood pretension.

He understood bad conversation, fashionable opinions, romantic foolishness, social climbing, intellectual confusion, and the comedy produced whenever human beings become completely certain of themselves.

His greatness lies partly in the fact that he rarely needed to announce the joke.

He simply arranged the sentence carefully enough for us to see it.

Nearly two centuries after his birth, writers are still confronting the standard Gustave Flaubert helped establish: observe closely, distrust the easy phrase, revise until the language carries exactly the weight it needs, and never assume that an ordinary life is too ordinary for great fiction.

“Do not read as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
-Gustave Flaubert