에밀 졸라와 함께 프랑스 사실주의 소설의 완벽한 경지를 보여주는 그는 사실 매우 내성적이고 몽환적인 낭만주의자였다. 작품에 대한 그의 엄격성은 자연과학의 인과관계를 탐구해 인간의 심층심리를 파헤치려는 의도에 앞서 자신의 낭만적인 환상과 현실의 의리를 완충하려는 노력에서 비롯된 것이라 한다. 따라서 그의 작업은 고통스러운 것이고 그러한 고통 속에서 탄생된 작품은 단어 하나만 빼도 그 작품 전체의 골격이 무너지는 완벽한 예술품이 되는 것이다. 대표작품으로는『보바리 부인』『살람보』『감정교육』이 있다.

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a prominent physician. A solitary child, he was attracted to literature at an early age, and after his recovery from a nervous breakdown suffered while a law student, he turned his total energies to writing. Aside from journeys to the Near East, Greece, Italy, and North Africa, and a stormy liaison with the poetess Louise Colet, his life was dedicated to the practice of his art. The form of his work was marked by intense aesthetic scrupulousness and passionate pursuit of le mot juste; its content alternately reflected scorn for French bourgeois society and a romantic taste for exotic historical subject matter. The success of Madame Bovary (1857) was ensured by government prosecution for “immorality”; Salammbo (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) received a cool public reception; not until the publication of Three Tales (1877) was his genius popularly acknowledged. Among fellow writers, however, his reputation was supreme. His circle of friends included Turgenev and the Goncourt brothers, while the young Guy de Maupassant underwent an arduous literary apprenticeship under his direction. Increasing personal isolation and financial insecurity troubled his last years. His final bitterness and disillusion were vividly evidenced in the savagely satiric Bouvard and Pecuchet, left unfinished at his death in 1880.

Geoffrey Wall is author of the critically acclaimed Flaubert: A Life and translated Madame Bovary for Penguin Classics.