Familiar to admirers of Gustave Flaubert as the writer with whom he had a tempestuous affair, Louise Colet has not—until fairly recently—enjoyed a good press. Yet it was to her that Flaubert addressed the now celebrated letters on his art that make the genesis of Madame Bovary one of the best-charted in fiction. Fifty years ago, one leading Flaubert scholar could just bring himself to say of this poet and woman of letters that a novel of hers was “not without talent” and that she herself was “not without genuine grievances.” However, the wave of feminism since the 1970s has swept Louise Colet, known variously to her contemporaries as “the Muse,” “Penserosa,” “Sappho,” along with it. Julian Barnes had her argue her own case persuasively in a chapter of his amusing Flaubert’s Parrot. There have been at least two French biographies of this independent spirit (one by Micheline Bood and Serge Grand, the other by Jean-Paul Clébert) in the last decade. Now a fluent American biography, by Francine du Plessix Gray, is to be welcomed.
One element in her favor: she was extremely beautiful (and knew it).
Born in Provence in 1810, Louise Révoil was famously endowed with a “southern” temperament, i.e., she was passionate and impetuous. She belonged with the generation of French high Romanticism, with its literature of personal confession and its generous humanitarian sympathies. Studious, ambitious, and totally without means, she married Hippolyte Colet, an equally impecunious (and as it turned out, unsuccessful)
