SOURCE: “Romancing Flaubert,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. XLI, No. 10, May 26, 1994, pp. 12–16.

In the following review, Barnes offers a positive assessment of Rage and Fire, calling the biography “heartfelt and impassioned.”

Who burned Louise Colet's letters to Flaubert? For a century it was taken for granted that the destroyer was Flaubert's niece Caroline, the inheritor of his literary estate. Caroline, the stiff, correct, high-bourgeois protector, “la dame si bien,” who in publishing her uncle's correspondence cut out any passages she deemed intimate or indecent, suppressed uncomplimentary opinions, changed his punctuation, and tidied up his phrasing; who wouldn't allow the expression “tenir le bec hors de l'eau” in a letter to Turgenev, gentrifying it into “tenir la tête hors de l'eau.” Such editorial interventionism was of the period: when negotiating with Louise Colet's equally proper daughter, Mme. Bissieu, Caroline received permission to publish 138 of Flaubert's letters...