A Simple Heart

Translated by Charlotte Mandell

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Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practice by literature's greatest writers. In the ART OF THE NOVELLA series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

With an attention to the details of bourgeois life considered almost scandalous at the time, A Simple Heart will remind many why Gustave Flaubert was acclaimed as the first great master of realism. But this heart-breaking tale of a simple servant woman and her life-long search for love meant something else to Flaubert. Written near…

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September 1, 2004

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GUSTAVE FLAUBERT was born in 1821 in Rouen, France, the son of a surgeon. He studied law but failed his exams and, after experiencing his first attack of what is thought to have been epilepsy—a condition he kept secret—he devoted himself to writing. His first novel, Madame Bovary, was published in 1857. It caused a scandal and led to Flaubert's prosecution on charges of immorality, but he was exonerated. His meticulous and realistic writing brought him continued recognition and esteem, although his subsequent books, such as A Sentimental Education and Salammbô, did not fare as well as Bovary, and he died in near-poverty in 1880.