Insights
Paul Féval occupies a fascinating corner of 19th-century French letters, somewhere between the grand popular success of Alexandre Dumas and the brooding urban…
Adolphe Adam is best known as a French composer, rather than as a novelist. Born in Paris in 1803, he created operas, opéra-comiques and ballets whose plots…
The Plays of Marivaux: The Game of Love and Chance offers a witty entry into one of French theatre’s most perceptive studies of desire, class and…
René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy remains one of the clearest invitations to examine how knowledge is formed. First published in Latin in 1641…
The correspondence of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné, offers one of the most vivid records of seventeenth-century French life. Written largely…
Zénaïde Fleuriot wrote about families, education, faith, money and the difficult passage from childhood into adulthood. Her novels belong to a…
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore wrote poems of extraordinary emotional force in a language that often appears simple at first glance. Her verses move through love,…
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve occupies a distinctive place in French literary history. He is remembered less for a single masterpiece than for the remarkable…
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier travelled through the Ottoman Empire, Persia, India and other parts of Asia during the seventeenth century, building a reputation as a…
The memoirs attributed to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord offer a compelling route into the political life of revolutionary and imperial France.…