Welcome to The Book Corner, a biweekly book review by a member of our fantastic Bromley High School community.
This week’s contribution is from Dr Christie. As an English teacher, Dr Christie is of course a keen and regular reader. Whenever he has a moment to spare he will generally choose to spend it with his nose in a book; either that or gardening, or indulging in retro video games! He is currently taking a break from his usual reading of novels to read a biography of one of his favourite writers.
‘Flaubert: A Biography’ by Frederick Brown
I am currently reading a biography of the nineteenth century French novelist Gustave Flaubert.
Flaubert was a contemporary of Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot. However his novels are very different to theirs, in part because his style and ideas were formed in the atmosphere of France during the post-Napoleonic era. Flaubert is a writer I have been fascinated with since reading his first mature work Madame Bovary at university.
It is wonderful to learn more about his life from Brown’s biography, such as how growing up in the hospital which was run by his father exposed him to gruesome medical practices which then reappear in much of his later fiction.
