‘The Most Thrilling and Fascinating Book of the Century’

Abstract

Few nineteenth-century writers have been considered more resolutely ‘highbrow’ than Gustave Flaubert. For Virginia Woolf, ‘there can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is’, and Flaubert embodied it.¹ Moreover, critics have insisted on Flaubert’s contempt for anything approaching the ‘middlebrow’, despite the fact that the term was only coined in the 1920s.² James Winders refers to Flaubert’s ‘well-known scorn for the bourgeois middle-brow mentality’³ and Allen describes his novels as scathing critiques of ‘middlebrow morals and reading practices’.⁴ Flaubert’s highbrow credentials have been used to illustrate the splintering of the reading public in the late nineteenth century. ‘In the years after 1860 the vanguard of the dominant intellectual, literary and artistic culture of Britain defined itself in terms of a rejection of provincial—that is, basically native—values’.⁵ Flaubert is repeatedly portrayed as having been either ignored by the majority of Victorian readers,⁶ or accorded at best occasional, mostly negative attention.⁷ George Moore, Walter Pater and Henry James were his main champions, reinforcing the aura of exclusivity surrounding him.⁸