The Religion of Despair: George Sand and Gustave Flaubert on Reading and Writing

Abstract

The chapter starts off from a reading of Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, which it considers as a reflection on the limits of bibliotherapy. The novel is then related to the correspondence between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert (Winter 1875), in which the two writer friends take opposing sides in the debate on the consolatory purposes and effects of literature. Sand famously reproaches Flaubert of only being interested in the production of ‘desolation’.