Love and Friendship in the Archive: Amélie Bosquet & Gustave Flaubert

In this talk, research fellow Dr Victoria Baena will recount the friendship (and, eventually, dramatic rupture) in letters between Gustave Flaubert and Amélie Bosquet: a novelist, socialist and feminist activist, mostly known today, if at all, for having inspired his famous comment “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”

Drawing on original archival research, the presentation will be structured around the fascinating, flirtatious—but by all accounts platonic—friendship between Bosquet and Flaubert as it unfolds in their letters. It will also flesh out the life and background of this unconventional woman, whose life story reveals a constant negotiation between literature, activism, the need to make a living, and various emotional desires and intimacies.

The talk will also reflect more broadly on silences and asymmetries in the archive, especially by asking what’s at stake in the trope of the “forgotten woman writer.” Visitors will subsequently have the chance to browse photos and documents, including never-before-translated letters between Flaubert and Bosquet.

Victoria Baena is a research fellow in English & Modern Languages at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. Her academic writings have received the Naomi Schor essay prize, Society of Dix-Neuviémistes publication prize, and the Malcolm Bowie prize (runner-up), and her public essays and criticism have been published in The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Baffler, Dissent, and elsewhere. Her current book project, a literary and intellectual biography of Amélie Bosquet, has received recognition and support from the Camargo Foundation, Jentel Arts Residency, Tony Lothian First Biography Prize (shortlist), and the Kathy Chamberlain Award for women’s life writing.