Geoffrey Wall is een vooraanstaand literair biograaf en vertaler, met een bijzondere focus op Franse auteurs als Flaubert en George Sand. Zijn werk kenmerkt zich door een diepgaande betrokkenheid bij hun levens en geschriften, waarbij thema's, stijl en literaire nalatenschap worden onderzocht. Walls interesse in mondelinge geschiedenis verrijkt zijn bijdrage verder, door verleden en heden te verbinden om de creatieve processen van belangrijke literaire figuren te belichten.
Klassieke roman over een naar ongrijpbaar geluk hunkerende vrouw, die zich teleurgesteld door de nuchterheid en middelmatigheid van haar man, een dorpsdokter, in roekeloze liefdesverhoudingen stort, hetgeen tot haar ondergang leidt.
Geoffrey Wall’s narrative biography of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, the father of the author of Madame Bovary , follows him from his birth in a French provincial town a few years before the Revolution through to his distinguished career as a physician in an industrial city. Growing up under the corrosive anguish of the Terror, he emerged as a talented schoolboy who read Voltaire and imbibed the radical materialism of the 1790s. As an aspiring medical student in Paris, he embraced the new scientific medicine and climbed the ladder of his profession by avoiding military service. As a young doctor animated by humanitarian ideals, he was appointed to run a large hospital in Rouen where too many factory workers were dying young, the most insidious public health problem of the new age. He was to remain there for thirty years. Drawing on archival sources in Paris, Rouen and Sens, the book includes meticulous period details, such as an account of postoperative care in the age before anaesthetics. The author asks what happened to Enlightenment ideals in the age of industry and examines the conflict between science and religion.This is not only a biography of an eminent nineteenth-century physician but a collective moral history of the Napoleon generation.