| Barbey d'Aurevilly | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly 2 November 1808 Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, Manche, France |
| Died | 23 April 1889 Paris |
| Nationality | French |
Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (2 November 1808 –
23 April 1889) was a French novelist
and short story
writer. He specialised in mystery tales that explored hidden
motivation and hinted at evil without being explicity concerned
with anything supernatural. He had a decisive influence on writers
such as Auguste Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam, Henry
James and Marcel
Proust.
Contents |
Barbey d'Aurevilly was born at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte (Manche) in Normandy. His greatest successes as a literary writer date from 1852 onwards, when he became an influential literary critic at the Bonapartist paper Le Pays, helping to rehabilitate Balzac and effectually promoting Stendhal, Flaubert, and Baudelaire. Paul Bourget describes Barbey as an idealist, who sought and found in his work a refuge from the uncongenial ordinary world. Jules Lemaître, a less sympathetic critic, thought the extraordinary crimes of his heroes and heroines, his reactionary opinions, his dandyism and snobbery were a caricature of Byronism.
Beloved of Fin-de-siècle decadents, Barbey d'Aurevilly remains an example of the extremes of late romanticism. Barbey d'Aurevilly held extreme Catholic opinions, yet wrote about risqué subjects, a contradiction apparently more disturbing to the English than to the French themselves. Barbey d'Aurevilly was also known as a dandy artisan of his own persona, adopting an aristocratic style and hinting at a mysterious past, though his parentage was provincial bourgeois nobility, and his youth comparatively uneventful.
Inspired by the character and ambience of Valognes, he set his works in the society of Normand aristocracy. Although he himself did not use the Norman patois, his example encouraged the revival of vernacular literature in his home region.
Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly died in Paris and was buried in the cimetière de Montparnasse. During 1926 his remains were transferred to the churchyard in Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte.
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His complete works are published in two volumes of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
"
Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules Amédée". Encyclopædia
Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
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