Sentimental Education
by Gustave Flaubert
Buy on AmazonSentimental Education: History of a Young Man is an 1869 novel by Gustave Flaubert. It focuses on the romantic life of a young man named Frédéric Moreau at the time of the French Revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire. It describes Moreau's love for an older woman, a character based on the wife of the music publisher Maurice Schlesinger, who is portrayed in the book as Jacques Arnoux. The novel's tone is by turns ironic and pessimistic; it occasionally lampoons French society. The main character often gives himself over to romantic flights of fancy.
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"My favorite novel and the greatest bildungsroman. It’s ultimately about the limits of experience compared to the fantasies of our desires—can actuality even compete with what we dream about?"
Favorite books · radicalreads.com
"It would have to be Flaubert for Sentimental Education."
By the Book: Candace Bushnell · nytimes.com
"Certainly, Flaubert's "Sentimental Education," the classic novel of romantic and political disillusion that I first read or failed to read in my teens, begins to make sense only as you cross over into middle age."
By the Book: Pankaj Mishra · nytimes.com