The Love Affair as a Work of Art

This is an unusual book: it has no pretense of scholarly contribution, yet is delightfully literary in a refreshingly casual way. Hofstadter delves insightfully and amusingly into the dynamics of love affairs between literary figures in 19th century France. He explores, sometimes speculatively but never reductively, how these figures' characters and backgrounds played into the ways that their entanglements unfolded, and feels for the links between love, understanding, letter writing, literary inspiration and creativity, and the social world of the time. Altogether charming ...