SOURCE: “Her Sentimental Education,” in Washington Post Book World, March 20, 1994, p. 5.

In the following positive review, Courtivron praises Gray's complex portrayal of Louise Colet in Rage and Fire.

When Flaubert was writing Madame Bovary in the early 1850's, he chronicled this arduous, painstaking process in a remarkable series of letters to his lover, Louise Colet. He also addressed to her his reflections on the craft of literature (“The author in his work must be like God in the universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible”)—maxims that have become sacred to generations of critics, writers, professors and graduate students. As a result, Louise Colet has been known in literary history chiefly as the recipient of such pronouncements, and as Flaubert's tempestuous and exigent Mistress and Muse.

What Francine du Plessix Gray's biography [Rage and Fire] reminds us is the extent to which many of these statements about literary impersonality...