Sentimental Education-2

Book excerpt: Although Gustave Flaubert's best known novel is Madame Bovary, many critics consider his later work, Sentimental Education, to be his masterpiece. It belongs to the type of realistic fiction that describes ordinary lives in detail, a genre at which Flaubert excelled. Sentimental Education paints the political and social background with such extraordinary fidelity that it is also a valuable record of the ideals and enthusiasms of a whole era. Telling the story of Frederic Moreau's unrequited lifelong love for another man's wife, Sentimental Education has always been considered a difficult and controversial book. Its original reviewers found the novel's form unsettling and its depiction of society amoral, and since then the novel has never had a lack of detractors and defenders.