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 racing driver of the same name). The English novelist John Fowles called this novel ‘the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature’; it is the one book carried around America by the protagonist of Jack Kerouac’s cult classic On the Road (1957), and it possibly even inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s eventual title for The Great Gatsby (1925). Alain-Fournier spent some time in England in 1905, working for a wallpaper factory in west London (which may go a little way towards explaining his interest in houses and habitation in this novel). He died in action in the first few weeks of the First World War, in 1914. Le Grand Meaulnes has been popular with French and English readers for a century, but has received relatively little critical analysis. In some ways a coming of age novel, it combines fairy-tale elements with the realities of France in the early twentieth century.
The double title of the novel as it comes to us points up the difficulty of translating its original title, which refers to the larger-than-life, charismatic youth, Augustin Meaulnes, who arrives at the school where the book’s narrator, the fifteen-year-old François Seurel, lives with his parents (who are both teachers).
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