The parents of playwright Arnold Wesker were both immigrants, tailor's machinists, Communists and culturally Jewish atheists. Wesker admitted he was "a very bad student", but his parents provided an environment of "constant ideological discussion at home, argument and disputation all the time... it was the common currency of day-to-day living that ideas were discussed around the table, and it was taken for granted that there were books in the house and that we would read". The books mostly had a leftward slant (Tolstoy, Gorky, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis) but Wesker soon reached out to Balzac, Maupassant and a broader raange of literature'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Wesker Print: Book
'...he had read so much of de Maupassant, and had admired him for so many years, that probably his manner and his conceptions had sunk into his subconscious. As he said to himself, on re-reading "Bel-Ami" after ten years in 1903 - "People might easily say that in "A Man from the North" I had plagiarized from it..."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
'When he reread "Une Vie", in March 1908, he could find faults, but they were irrelevant to the work that had been done to him.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
''"My masters... in poetry, were Swinburne and Meredith among the living, Rossetti, Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning among the lately dead. To these I would add Edward Fitzgerald... In prose, the masters were Stendhal, Flaubert, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Guy de Maupassant, Prosper Merimee and Walter Pater".'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: John Masefield Print: Book
Henry James to Theodore E. Child, 30 May 1885: "I ought already to have thanked you for your friendly thought and delicate attention in sending me Maupassant's ineffable novel, which I fell upon and devoured, with the utmost relish and gratitude. It brightened me up, here, for a day or two, amazingly."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry James Print: Book
Henry James to Henrietta Reubell, 7 July 1890: "I have read Notre Coeur but haven't looked at Bourget in the Figaro."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry James Print: Unknown
'Absorbed as always in books, Willie read seriously in both French and German literature. His favourites in French were the "Maximes" of La Rochefoucauld, "La Princesse de Cleves" (which inspired his play "Caesar's Wife"), the tragedies of Racine, the novels of Voltaire, Stendhal's "Le Rouge et le Noir" and "La Chartreuse de Parme", Balzac's "Pere Goriot", Flaubert's "Madame Bovary", the works of Anatole France, the exotic tales of Pierre Loti and the well-crafted stories of Maupassant'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Somerset Maugham Print: Book
'. . . I have just finished Guy de Maupassant?s Bel Ami. One of the most obviously truthful, British-matron-shocking, disgusting, attractive, overwhelmingly-powerful novels I have ever read. It would be a good antidote to Le Jardin de Berenice. Would you like it?'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
'Saturday,13th February,
Read ?Notre Coeur? (Guy de Maupassant)'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gerald Moore Print: Book
'My favourite masters & models: 1. Turgenev, a royal first (you must read 'On the Eve'?flawless I tell you. Bring back such books of mine as you have; I have others you must read). 2. de Maupassant. 3. de Goncourts. 4. George Moore?the great author who can neither write nor spell!
Stevenson only helps me in minute details of style.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
'The subject of "La Maison Tellier" is the licensed brothel and its inmates'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
Tuesday 21 August 1934: 'I read Une Vie last night, & it seemed to me rather marking time & watery -- heaven help me -- in comparison [to last chapter of own work in progress]'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Tuesday 2 October 1934:
'Books read or in reading [over summer 1934]:
Sh[akespea]re. Troilus.
Pericles.
Taming of Shrew.
Cymbeline.
Maupassant.
de Vigny. only scraps [the four French authors grouped by bracket in MS]
St Simon.
Gide.
Library books: Powys
Wells
Lady Brooke.
Prose. Dobree.
Alice James.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'I am reading Maupassant with delight. I have just finished "Le Lys rouge" by Anatole France. it means nothing to me. I can do no serious reading. I have just begun to write -only the day before yesterday.["The Two Vagabonds" subsequently to become "An Outcast of the Islands"(1896)]
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book, see additional comments
'I fear I may be too much under the influence of Maupassant. I have studied "Pierre et Jean" - thought, method and all - with the profoundest despair. It seems nothing but has a technical complexity which makes me tear my hair. one feels like weeping with rage while reading it. Ah well!'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'I've lazed-- though I must say I did look through all the stories. It was the first look and I have done no actual underlining.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Manuscript: Unknown
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, postscript to letter postmarked 1 February 1909:
'I never thanked you for the books [...] they are a godsend especially as I have just got to the end practically of the last batch I ordered out. I suddenly thought I must read Maupassant again & when I reread the tale about the child who is pinched on the buttocks by the adulterating captain I thought I was right. I also read [the Earl of Cromer's] Modern Egypt & you can deduce my state of mind by the fact that I think it is the greatest book written in the last 25 years.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Referring to Elsie Hueffer's translation of Maupassant: 'I've "suggested" on the proof numbered 2 everything that occurred to me as improvement. Your work and your corrections are all right. The preface is extremely good.' Hence follow twelve lines of minor comments about the translation, mostly directed at Ford's preface,rather than Elsie's translation of the text.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Manuscript: Proofs
'The other day I took up "Yvette". How well she [Ada Galsworthy] has done it all!'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'At the foot of the bed was an oak "library table" [...]. There were several piles of books on it, W. W. Jacobs for light reading, de Maupassant, Flaubert, Galsworthy, Cunninghame Graham, various periodicals, and a book, which has always been a mystery to me, "Out of the Hurly Burly" by Max Ad[e]ler. In the window stood an arm chair of cherry wood, lacquered black, on which my father often sat to read for half an hour or so before "turning in".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'What really brought us [Ford and Conrad] together was a devotion to Flaubert and Maupassant. We discovered we both had Félicité, "St.-Julien l'Hospitalier", immense passages of "Madame Bovary", "La Nuit", "Ce Cochon de Morin" and immense passages of "Une Vie" by heart. Or so nearly by heart that what the one faltered over the other could take up.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'What really brought us [Ford and Conrad] together was a devotion to Flaubert and Maupassant. We discovered we both had Félicité, "St.-Julien l'Hospitalier", immense passages of "Madame Bovary", "La Nuit", "Ce Cochon de Morin" and immense passages of "Une Vie" by heart. Or so nearly by heart that what the one faltered over the other could take up.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'What really brought us [Ford and Conrad] together was a devotion to Flaubert and Maupassant. We discovered we both had Félicité, "St.-Julien l'Hospitalier", immense passages of "Madame Bovary", "La Nuit", "Ce Cochon de Morin" and immense passages of "Une Vie" by heart. Or so nearly by heart that what the one faltered over the other could take up.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Serial / periodical
'From that time for ten years Conrad followed the sea. The deep sea, reading all sorts of books. Once an officer with quarters of his own he resumed his reading of French along with the English popular works. He read with the greatest veneration Flaubert and Maupassant; with less, Daudet and Gautier; with much less, Pierre Loti. Tormented with the curiosity of words, even at sea, on the margins of the French books he made notes for the translation of phrases. The writer has seen several of these old books of Conrad, notably an annotated copy of "Pêcheur d'Islande" — and of course the copy of "Madame Bovary" upon the endpapers and margins of which "Almayer's Folly" was begun.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'In one letter, written in June 1893, he logs Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, Lorna Doone ("seventh or eighth time"), Saintsbury's Essays on French Novelists, Dumas's Tulipe Noire, Maupassant, and some poems of Hugo and Gautier. A month later he is reporting on Andrew Lang's Lectures on Literature ("very good"), P. G. Hamerton's Intellectual Life ("excellent"), the poems of Robert Bridges ("very good") Henry James's Madonna of the Future ("peculiar"), R. L. Stevenson's Kidnapped and Master of Ballantrae ("fourth or fifth time"), Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, and Ibsen's Doll House, League of Youth and Pillars of Society. "I am beginning to like Ibsen more than I did. I understand him better."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buchan Print: Book
