SOURCE: Wright, Barbara. “Valdieu: A Forgotten Precursor of Fromentin's Dominique.” Modern Language Review 60, no. 4 (October 1965): pp. 520-28.

In the following essay, Wright considers the influence that Valdieu had on Fromentin and the writing of Dominique.

Within a tradition like that of the French personal novel, direct literary ‘influences’ are as elusive as the end of the rainbow, and just about as insubstantial when they are found. Few authors of personal novels have been spared acrimonious debates as to literary sources and possible plagiarisms,¹ when in fact they were contributing to a collective culture in which each exponent accepts an inherited framework on which to base his own individual contribution. Taken as a whole, the history of the French personal novel emerges, not as the work of petty pilferers, but as a noble tradition acting on writers who, in their turn, enhance it and pass it on to posterity...