Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821. Flaubert's father, who serves as a model for the character Dr. Larivière in Madame Bovary, was a surgeon in practice at Rouen; his mother was connected with some of the oldest Norman families. The influence of a medical background is evident both in the content of Madame Bovary and in his 'scientific' style.

This bourgeois background Flaubert found early burdensome. His rebel against it led to his expulsion from school, and Flaubert completed his education privately in Paris.

As a writer Flaubert was a perfectionist, who did not make a distinction between a beautiful or ugly subject: all was in the style. The idea, he argued, only exists by virtue of its form - its elements included the perfect word, cunningly contrived and verified rhythms, and a genuine architectural structure.

He is said to have been idle at school, but to have been occupied with literature from the age of eleven. Flaubert started to write during his school years. A disappointment in his teens - Flaubert fell in love with Elisa Schlésinger, who was married and some 10 years his senior - inspired much of his early writing.

Flaubert in his youth was full of vigour and a certain shy grace, enthusiastic, intensely individual, and apparently without a trace of ambition. He loved the country and Paris was extremely distasteful to him. He made the acquaintance of Victor Hugo, and towards the close of 1840 he travelled in the Pyrenees and Corsica. Returning to Paris, he wasted his time daydreaming, living on his patrimony.

In 1844 he suffered a form of epileptic seizure which forced him to give up his hated legal studies in Paris and allowed him to devote himself to his writing. In 1846 he retired to the quiet Normandy village of Croisset. Until he was 50 years old, Flaubert lived with his mother and his niece Caroline.

Despite his relative isolation he travelled widely; he witnessed the 1848 uprising in Paris (which he later drew on for A Sentimental Education), toured the Near East with his friend and fellow writer Maxime du Camp and visited North Africa to collect material for the novel Salammbô. Surprisingly for a man famed for his literary misanthropy he also enjoyed the company of a wide variety of friends; he was closest to the writer Louis Bouilhet, but he also corresponded with the Goncourt brothers, Sainte-Beuve, George Sand and even Princesse Mathilde, Napoleon III's cousin.

From 1846 to 1854 he had an affair with the poet Louise Colet; his letters to her have been preserved, and according to Émile Faguet, their affair was the only sentimental episode of any importance in the life of Flaubert, who never married. Their relationship lasted until 1857 and their extensive and intimate correspondence has shed much light on the composition of Madame Bovary.

Madame Bovary was Flaubert's first published novel, although he had been writing since childhood and had already completed the first version of A Sentimental Education and The temptation of Saint Anthony, based on the story of the 4th-century Christian anchorite, who lived in the Egyptian desert and experienced philosophical and physical temptations. Its fantastic mode and setitbusng were inspired by a Brueghel painting.

When Flaubert presented The temptation of Saint Anthony to Bouilhet and Du Camp in 1849 they are reputed to have advised him to throw such lyrical nonsense on the fire and write a realist novel instead. So began the arduous task of writing Madame Bovary. Flaubert's obsession with style meant that composition dragged on for five years - he compared the process to "a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles". The novel was first published in serial form in the "Revue de Paris" in 1856; despite cutitbusng certain scenes Flaubert and the magazine were charged with irreligion and offending public morality. They were acquitted, the scandal guaranteeing the novel's enormous success. When Baudelaire's collection of verse, The Flowers of Evil, was brought before the same judge, Baudelaire was fined.

Flaubert paid a visit to Carthage in 1858 in order to gather material for his next novel, Salammbô, a story of the siege of Carthage in 240-237 BC by mercenaries, which was not finished until 1862 in spite of the author's ceaseless labors.

He went on to publish Salammbô to great acclaim in 1862; the second (and entirely separate) version of A Sentimental Education (1869) was less warmly received.

In the 1860s Flaubert enjoyed success as a writer and intellectual at the court of Napoleon III. Among his friends were Zola, George Sand, Hippolyte Taine, and the Russian writer Turgenev, with whom he shared similar aesthetic ideals - dedication to realism, and to the nonjudgmental representation of life. Their complete correspondence was published in English in 1985.

During the war of 1870, Prussian soldiers occupied his house. He began to suffer from nervous maladies. Bereavement and financial concerns made the period after 1870 more difficult for Flaubert. His best friends were taken from him by death or by misunderstanding; in 1872 he lost his mother, and his circumstances became greatly reduced. Nevertheless, the conclusive version of The temptation of Saint Anthony appeared in 1874 and Three Tales was published in 1877.

He spent the remainder of his life toiling at a vast satire on the futility of human knowledge and the ubiquity of mediocrity, which he left unfinished. This is the depressing and bewildering Bouvard et Pécuchet (posthumously printed, 1881), which he believed to be his masterpiece.

He died of a cerebral hemorrage on May 8, in 1880 at Croisset, but was buried in the family vault in the cemetery of Rouen.

The personal character of Flaubert offered various peculiarities. Flaubert was by nature melancholic. His perfectionism, long hours at his work table with a frog inkwell, only made his life harder. He was shy, and yet extremely sensitive and arrogant; he passed from silence to an indignant and noisy flow of language. He despised his fellow-men, their habits, their lack of intelligence, their contempt for beauty, with a passionate scorn which has been compared to that of an ascetic monk.

Selected works:

• Madame Bovary, 1857
• Salambo, 1862
• A sentimental education, 1869
• Three tales, 1872
• The candidate, 1874
• The temptation of Saint Anthony, 1874
• Bouvard and Pécuchet, 1881
• Over Strand and Field, 1886
• The feeble sex, 1910
• Dictionary of accepted ideas, 1911
• Selected letters, 1953
• The First Sentimental Education, 1963
• Complete works, 1964
• Flaubert in Egypt, 1972

Bibliography:

• Flaubert: A Life by Geoffrey Wall (2001)
• Gustave Flaubert by William J. Berg, et al (1997)
• Flaubert Writing: A Study in Narrative Strategies by Michal Peled Ginsburg ( 1986)
• Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty by Jonathan Culler (1985)
• Flaubert and Turgenev: A Friendship in Letters, by Barbara Beaumont (1985)
• Flaubert and the Historical Novel by Anne Green (1982)
• The Novels of Flaubert by Victor Brombert (1966)