SOURCE: Latiolais, F. M. “‘Not Quite a Masterpiece’—Fromentin's Dominique Reconsidered.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 4, no. 1 (fall 1970): 35-48.

In the following essay, Latiolais examines the appeal of Dominique despite the criticism leveled against it.

It is the fate of any book either to find successive readers or to perish and be relegated to the vaults of literary history, there to be looked at only by inspectors whose interest is more or less clinical. Eugène Fromentin's Dominique, in spite of its obvious deficiencies and many detractors, has managed somehow to find new readers through whom it continues to live after more than a century. It is an anomalous work, for even those who championed it at the very beginning, such as George Sand who read the novel when it was published serially in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1862, and Sainte-Beuve and Th...