Early Works

New Translations

By: Gustave Flaubert

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Before Madame Bovary. Before Sentimental Education. Before the ferocious self-discipline that made Flaubert one of the most exacting writers who ever lived — there was a teenager in Rouen, writing in secret, at full intensity, with no audience and no restraint.

This collection gathers Flaubert's earliest works, written between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, and published here together for the first time. They include tales of obsession, horror, forbidden passion, satanic rebellion, and premature death — a bookseller who kills for rare volumes; a creature born of man and ape who cannot speak and cannot belong; a woman destroyed by adultery; a man buried alive; a young writer's first attempt to make literature out of a love that would haunt him for thirty years.

Alongside the darkness there is comedy, caricature, autobiography, and philosophical ambition — the full, chaotic range of a mind in the act of becoming itself. The earliest pieces bear the unmistakable marks of French Romanticism, the literary world into which Flaubert was born. The later ones — above all Memoirs of a Madman and the novella November — begin to sound like something else entirely: the first, hesitant notes of a voice that would go on to change the history of the novel.

Flaubert concealed these works from the public and kept most of them unpublished throughout his life. He knew they were excessive, unruly, and unfinished. He also knew — as every reader of this collection will — that they were alive.