I recently noted that I had had Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education on my shelves for years, intending to read it for a fortnightly book, but just kept forgetting about it. This therefore seems a good time not to forget about it.
Sentimental Education: History of a Young Man is Flaubert's third published novel, and came out in 1869, when Flaubert was forty-eight. It was heavily influential on both French Romanticism and French Naturalism, and is sometimes said to mark the beginning of a new era in novelistic style -- emphasizing scene depiction over commentary, artificially maintaining a neutrality of description in ethical matters, deliberately hiding the author's role in telling the story. At the time of its publication, however, it was a failure, and while it's often hailed today as Flaubert's masterpiece, it seems to be considered less approachable than Flaubert's first novel, Madame Bovary (which I did for the Fortnightly Book fourteen years ago!).
We will see, in any case. I am reading it in the Dover Thrift Edition. I don't know who the translator is. The note on the bibliographical page says:
This Dover edition, first published in 2006, is an unabridged republication of the uncredited translation, edited by Dora Knowlton Ranous, that was published by Brentano's, New York, in 1922. The Introduction by Louise Bogan is reprinted from the edition of Sentimental Education published by New Direction Books, New York, in 1957.
