The Love Affair as a Work of Art [Paperback]

This series of entwined biographical sketches recounts how, in the Romantic Era, love affairs, often illicit, were transformed into novels, memoirs, and published correspondences. We make the intimate acquaintance of great writers like Mme de Staël, Chateaubriand, George Sand, and Anatole France, who, however, fall gradually under the suspicion of pursuing their amorous entanglements for “good material.” The tale ends with a moving account, based on unpublished sources, of the strange, intense friendship of Marcel Proust and Jeanne Pouquet, the girl who became the model for Gilberte in Swann’s Way. Disenchanted yet compassionate, this book explores how our affections may be exalted (and at times betrayed) by our desire to refashion them as stories.

Dan Hofstadter was educated at Columbia University and the Sorbonne, to which he received a French scholarship. He has contributed to many national journals, includingSmithsonian, theWall Street Journal, and theNew Yorker, serving as a contract writer for the latter for eight years. He is the author of five works of nonfiction.The Love Affair as a Work of Art(1996) was nominated for a Book Critics Circle Award;Falling Palace(2005) was nominated for an American PEN Award. 

“Mr. Hofstadter writes with elegance and sensitivity. His style is often aphoristic; it is witty, but without malice. Even on well-trodden ground, his narrative gifts make him a pleasure to read. And there is substance to his book. He knows the latest scholarship and critical literature, but never flaunts his erudition. The variety of themes he broaches—the bond between jealousy and the creative imagination, the interplay of lies and sincerity, the optics of memory, the essential mystery of the personality—enriches The Love Affair as a Work of Art and creates that certain instability that characterl“(