Insights
When Alphonse de Lamartine published his first major poetry collection in 1820, he gave French literature one of its most enduring works: the Méditations…
Few eighteenth-century authors produced a body of work that still resonates with both scientists and literary readers. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon,…
A glass slipper, a midnight deadline, and a kind girl transformed by magic: these elements have travelled from the court of Louis XIV to screens, stages, and…
François-Timoléon de Choisy is not the first name that springs to mind when Australian readers think of French memoirists, yet his secret autobiography,…
Eugène Fromentin is remembered today as both a painter and a writer, but his 1863 novel Dominique often slips between the two reputations. The book draws on…
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve spent four decades at the centre of Parisian literary life, writing essays that treated the author as inseparable from the work.…
For nearly half a century, two French writers sat down at the end of almost every day and recorded what they had seen, heard, read and felt. Edmond de Goncourt…
Few eighteenth-century French texts provoke as much heated debate as the Marquis de Sade's short philosophical novel. Written during the dark years of the…
Ann Radcliffe's haunted castles, breathing ruins, and landscapes trembling with the sublime made her the most translated English novelist in France between…
Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit occupies a distinctive place in French literary history. Published posthumously in 1842, the collection transformed…