Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle Previously, we’ve offered ten of the best poems about the city, ten of the best New York poems, and some of our favourite poems about London. Now, it’s time to hop across the Channel to the French capital, with ten of the greatest poems about […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses Alain-Fournier’s curious novel about lost innocence Published in 1913, The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) (Penguin Classics) is the one novel by Henri Alban-Fournier, otherwise known as Alain-Fournier (the hyphen was supposedly left in to differentiate him from a […]
The best facts about French literature French literature has often been one step ahead of the literary curve, to risk mixing our progressive metaphors. Before T. S. Eliot and other Anglophone poets had found a way to write about the modern city, Charles Baudelaire had already shown a way forward. […]
An introduction to a classic French play Tartuffe is one of Molière’s masterpieces. The play was first performed as a three-act comedy in May 1664, and was immediately denounced for supposedly ‘attacking’ religion through its portrayal of the pious titular hypocrite, Tartuffe. The religious zealots who objected to the play […]
The interesting life of a pioneering French writer ‘George’ was the pseudonym of choice for nineteenth-century women writers: George Eliot (Marian Evans), George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne). But these women were following an unconventional French writer in choosing to Georgify themselves for publication. In this post, we offer a very […]