Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly
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Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (November 2, 1808 – April 23, 1889), was a French novelist and short story writer. He specialised in a kind of mysterious tale that examines hidden motivation and hinted evil bordering (but never crossing into) the supernatural. He had a decisive influence on writers such as Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Henry James and Proust.
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[edit] Biography
He was born at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte (Manche) in Normandy. In the 1850s, Barbey d'Aurevilly became literary critic of Le Pays. Paul Bourget describes him as a dreamer with an exquisite sense of vision, who sought and found in his work a refuge from the uncongenial world of the every day. Jules Lemaître, a less sympathetic critic, finds in the extraordinary crimes of his heroes and heroines, in his reactionary views, his dandyism and snobbery, an exaggerated Byronism.
Beloved of Fin-de-siècle decadents, Barbey d'Aurevilly is a classic example of the manner of which the Romanticists were capable and to read him is to understand the discredit that fell upon that manner among the later Victorians. He held extreme Catholic views, yet wrote on the most risqué subjects (an apparent conflict more troubling to the English than to the French; Voltairiennisme would have been something else) he gave himself aristocratic airs and hinted at a mysterious past, though his parentage was entirely respectable and his youth humdrum and innocent.
Inspired by the character and ambience of Valognes, he set his works against the social pattern of the aristocracy of Normandy. Although he himself did not of course write in the Norman patois, he encouraged the revival of vernacular literature in his home region.
Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly died in Paris and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. In 1926 his remains were transferred to Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte's cemetery.
[edit] Works
- Une vieille maîtresse (An Elderly Mistress, 1851), attacked at the time of its publication on the charge of immorality.
- L'Ensorcelée (The Bewitched, 1854), an episode of the royalist rising among the Norman peasants against the first republic.
- Chevalier Destouches (1864)
- Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils, 1874), a collection of short stories, each of which relates a tale of a woman who commits an act of violence, a crime, or revenge.
His complete works are published in two volumes of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
[edit] References
- Thiollet, Jean-Pierre. Barbey d'Aurevilly ou le triomphe de l'écriture. H & D Editions. ISBN 2-914-266-06-5.
