ABSTRACT
Born only two years apart and dying in the same year, 1880, George Eliot and Flaubert led lives that seemed at times to move curiously in parallel without ever touching. among their earliest writings are the imaginings of marginal and eccentric outsiders: Flaubert’s Mémoires d’un fou, written when he was sixteen, and George Eliot’s ‘Poetry and Prose from the Notebooks of an Eccentric’, published in the Coventry Herald and Observer in the winter of 1846-1847. Their final works, Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) and Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), again have recourse to marginal and eccentric figures as vehicles for an ironic and critical engagement with contemporary culture. In the years between both writers achieved fame in the late 1850s with novels of provincial life, Madame Bovary (1857) and Adam Bede (1859); devoted themselves to laborious reconstructions of the distant past in exactly contemporaneous historical novels, Salammbô (1862) and Romola (1862-1863); and turned to very different versions of the Bildungsroman in their final novels, L’Education sentimentale (1869) and Daniel Deronda (1876). They shared a common literary heritage – Balzac and George Sand, for instance, were important precursors for both of them – and in their later years they had one significant literary friend in common, Ivan Turgenev, while the young Henry James also made the acquaintance of both of them.1 George Eliot travelled frequently to France throughout her adult life and Flaubert paid several visits to London. In 1851 they both visited the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park about the same time at the end of September; in July 1865 Flaubert was again in London when George Eliot was at her house in Regent’s Park, and, when she and G.H. Lewes set out on their tour of Normandy and Brittany in august of that year and visited Rouen, Flaubert was back at his home at Croisset a few miles outside the town. When George Eliot visited Paris at the end of December 1866, she met intellectuals and writers at Mme Mohl’s,2 among them Ernest Renan, a friend of Flaubert’s; but the two novelists themselves never met, and there is little evidence of any familiarity with each other’s work.
