Stendhal Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Stendhal

Among the four greatest novelists of nineteenth-century France, Stendhal is noteworthy for the intensity of conscience and feeling in his characters, and for beginning his publication of fictional works later in life than did Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola. These two facts may have a common cause. Stendhal was usually preoccupied with self-image, and as a result he was by turns timid or brazen, sensitive or cynical, evasive or forthright, never sure of how he was being perceived by others. These aspects of his personality appear in the portraits of his heroes and in his narrative technique, but they may also account for his waiting until age forty-four to publish his first novel. Having filled hundreds of pages in his diaries, and with nonfiction works already in print, he finally had the confidence to risk public scrutiny of a totally creative work. His sense of the craft of fiction developed quickly after the appearance of his novel Armance (1827), and his later novels have an important place in the development of literary realism.

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