Insights
Balzac wrote Eugénie Grandet in 1833, at the height of his ambition to map every corner of French society through fiction. The novel sits near the opening of…
Phèdre remains the most lacerating of Jean Racine's eleven surviving tragedies, a play in which the human heart becomes a battlefield between confession and…
Few French novels of the eighteenth century carry as much baggage as the Marquis de Sade's Justine. Originally published in 1791 under the full title Justine,…
The final prose poem that Arthur Rimbaud ever published continues to disturb readers more than a century after its appearance in Brussels in 1873. Une Saison…
The name Alexandre Dumas still carries the swagger of a Parisian boulevard and the weight of a 19th-century press run. His novels sold in staggering numbers…
The Duchess of Duras belongs to the small group of nineteenth-century French writers whose private writings matter more than their published ones. Claire de…
Tocqueville's Democracy in America stands as one of the most influential works of nineteenth-century political analysis, a two-volume study written by a young…
For readers who first met Captain Nemo through a battered Penguin paperback at a suburban Dymocks, the experience feels like diving without preparation. Twenty…
Few novels have provoked as much public outrage, legal action, and quiet admiration as Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. First serialised in the Revue de Paris…
Few books of poetry have provoked as much scandal, admiration and quiet astonishment as Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. Published in 1857, the…