Selected Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant

Sex, treated frankly and openly, just is a major theme of French fiction in a way it isn’t among the more repressed English. Thirty of the ‘best’ short stories are collected and translated by Roger Colet in the 1971 Penguin edition I’ve had since school. The nearest comparison for workrate and stories might be Kipling. In the 1880s Maupassant wrote six novels and over 300 short stories, became well-known as a reporter and columnist, travelled widely and wrote accounts of his journeys he bought a yacht, had numerous affairs and became celebrated for his parties. Workrate The success of Boule de Suif inaugurated an amazingly productive decade. Love Contrast the improbable ‘love affair’ at the heart of Stevenson’s ‘ Olalla‘ (1885) – the visiting English officer falls immediately head over heels in love with the beautiful daughter of the ‘degenerate’ Spanish family – with the themes of human sexuality, bourgeois morality and the corrupting influence of military occupation in Maupassant’s first published story, ‘ Boule de Suif‘ (1880).įrance and Britain Hard to avoid the conclusion that 19th century French culture was adult while British Victorian culture was somehow deeply childish: Flaubert and Maupassant, Zola and Mallarme versus Stevenson and Haggard, Conan Doyle and Kipling.

The difference is typified by Maupassant’s adult depiction of sex compared with the almost complete absence of believable women in Stevenson’s fiction. The comparison immediately highlights Maupassant’s seriousness as an artist against Stevenson’s delittantism, Maupassant’s subtle explorations of war and human relations contrasted with Stevenson’s boy’s own stories. The French short story writer Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (b.5 August 1850) was a close contemporary of Robert Louis Stevenson (b.November 13 1850).

Selected Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant