Exploring English Realist fiction

Abstract

Late in life Andre Gide was to describe his initial discovery of English literature as similar to Sinbad’s marvellous journey through the magic cave which glittered with precious jewels. Various people, of course, had helped him on his way, ranging from Hippolyte Taine, and Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte in translation, and Thomas Carlyle (extracts in French) whom he read in his youth and early manhood. There were friends whom he often met and with whom he corresponded, both English like Edmund Gosse, Arnold Bennett and Dorothy Bussy, and French like Charles du Bos, Henri D. Davray (more an antagonist than a friend, perhaps),1 Valery Larbaud and Andre Ruyters. On the occasion when the last named went to London and Cambridge during the Great War, he wrote to Gide detailing his rich discoveries among the second-hand bookshops, including tempting sets of great authors and places where ‘special’ books might be procured. It was Ruyters who sent Gide the catalogue of the publisher Carrington, whose presence in Paris had been dictated by the somewhat scabrous nature of his list (see Gide, 1990, Correspondance Gide-Ruyters, 1895–1950, 12 November 1916 and 11 June 1918). There was also Oscar Wilde. Gide acquired a reasonable command of English from about 1918, when he stayed for the summer in Cambridge, but he had made several attempts to learn the language before this, and Gosse had in fact written to him on 22 March 1911: ‘But why do you not read English?