The Sentimental Education of the Novel

The nineteenth-century French novel has long been seen as the heroic production of great men, who confronted in their works the social consequences of the French Revolution, it is true that French realism, as developed by Balzac and Stendhal, was one of the most influential novelistic forms invented. Margaret Cohen, however, challenges the traditional account of the genesis of realism by returning Balzac and Stendhal to the forgotten novelistic contexts of their time. Reconstructing a key formative period for the novel, she shows how realist codes emerged in a hostile takeover of a prestigious contemporary sentimental practice of the novel, which was dominated by women writers. Cohen draws on impressive archival research to demonstrate that the codes most closely identified with realism were actually the invention of sentimentality, although Balzac and Stendhal trivialized sentimental works by associating them with frivolous women writers and readers.