The Love Affair as a Work of Art

By Dan Hofstadter

Book Overview

This series of entwined biographical sketches recounts how, in the Romantic Era, love affairs, often illicit, were transformed into novels, memoirs, and published correspondences. We make the intimate acquaintance of great writers like Mme de Sta?l, Chateaubriand, George Sand, and Anatole France, who, however, fall gradually under the suspicion of pursuing their amorous entanglements for "good material." The tale ends with a moving account, based on unpublished sources, of the strange, intense friendship of Marcel Proust and Jeanne Pouquet, the girl who became the model for Gilberte in Swann's Way. Disenchanted yet compassionate, this book explores how our affections may be exalted (and at times betrayed) by our desire to refashion them as stories.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1504008138
• ISBN13: 9781504008136
• Release Date: April 2015
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
• Length: 298 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

charming

This is an unusual book: it has no pretense of scholarly contribution, yet is delightfully literary in a refreshingly casual way. Hofstadter delves insightfully and amusingly into the dynamics of love affairs between literary figures in 19th century France. He explores, sometimes speculatively but never reductively, how these figures' characters and backgrounds played into the ways that their entanglements unfolded, and feels for the links between love, understanding, letter writing, literary inspiration and creativity, and the social world of the time. Altogether charming ...