Few modern novelists have been able to entertain and shock their readers in equal proportions quite as successfully as the author of Madame Bovary, the subject of Geoffrey Wall's Flaubert: A Life. Flaubert's famous heroine stands alongside Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Tess Durbeyfield as among the most brilliant creations of the golden age of the great novel. Yet Madame Bovary skirted the outer limits of bourgeois sexual morality with perhaps more dare and flair than other writers, and consequently, seems as familiar now as it ever has. As Geoffrey Wall shows in his well-researched and engagingly written book, Flaubert himself epitomised both the wilder side and the contradictions of French bourgeois literary life in the middle of the 19th century. The pampered bachelor second son of a surgeon, he kept homes in Rouen and Paris, yet worked himself into chronic illness by his devotion to his art. He treated some women-notably his niece, Caroline, and George Sand, the novelist, as his confidantes and equals-yet cruised predator-like through the brothels and fleshpots of Paris and north Africa. A progressive in matters moral, he nonetheless repudiated the republicans of 1848 and moved effortlessly in the salons of Louis Napoleon's imperial regime. Wall is excellent on all this biographical detail, but rather at the expense of a proper appreciation of Flaubert's oeuvre. It takes 200 pages to get to Madame Bovary, and even then the analysis of the novel is rather brief, leaving this reader anxious to leave behind the extraordinary Gustave Flaubert with his boils, syphilis and debts, but determined to read his work all over again. -Miles Taylor.

In this remarkable new biography, Peter Ackroyd offers a different view of Dickens to that presented in his earlier study of the author. In that book, Ackroyd's attempts to mimic the voice of the great writer were highly controversial, though some saw the book as a radical re-invention of the biography form. There is no arguing with the brilliant achievement of the more straightforward Charles Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion, however; the picture of Dickens and his complicated private life that emerges is fastidiously detailed and powerfully evocative, while Ackroyd's customary skill at creating a panoply of the city of London is as dazzling as ever (London, is, in fact, the subject of another biography by the author, who is unquestionably the keenest chronicler of the city's colourful history). Here, Ackroyd attempts to peel away the mask of a man whose life was outwardly a picture of Victorian rectitude, but whose love life was as complicated (and unconventional) as any modern writer. Dickens had everything-fame, success and riches-but he died harbouring a deep sadness he had experienced all his life. He was a man of mercurial character, had enormous vitality and humour, but he also had a sense of loss and longing that would constantly appear in his work. Like many eminent Victorians, he led a double life: although he insisted that nothing in the newspapers he edited should upset his middle-class readers, he regularly indulged in dubious night-time escapades with fellow author Wilkie Collins, and, for the last 13 years of his life, kept a secret mistress. While presenting a warm but astringent portrait of the man who (along with George Eliot) can be classed as the greatest writer of his age, Ackroyd also masterfully recreates the relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, a strong and intelligent woman (herself the subject of a biography by Claire Tomalin, The Inviisble Woman who, like her lover, outwardly observed the proprieties while living her real life behind closed doors. Ackroyd also vividly conjures the reality of Victorian life, the issues that sparked Dickens' fervent call for social reform, and the great landmarks of the time, which profoundly affected his life and work. -Barry Forshaw.