D.J. Enright was a poet, novelist and academic. He taught for many years in universities in South-East Asia. He died in December 2002.
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Vol. 2 No. 18 · 18 September 1980
pages 11-12 | 2974 words
Juliet
D.J. Enright
- Flaubert and an English Governess by Hermia Oliver
Oxford, 212 pp, £9.50, June 1980, ISBN 0 19 815764 9
- The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857 edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller
Harvard, 270 pp, £7.50, March 1980, ISBN 0 674 52636 8
The English governess in question – very much in question – was Juliet Herbert, governess at the Flaubert home in Croisset to Flaubert’s much-loved niece, Caroline, between 1854/5 and 1857. Her acquaintanceship with the novelist lasted till his death in 1880, but the nature of the acquaintanceship is in dispute. The most tender of Flaubert’s affairs? Or a non-affair? Hermia Oliver believes that Juliet was ‘almost certainly’ Flaubert’s mistress: but the present book, a record of indefatigable research and meagre revelations, is stuffed with ‘probably’s’, ‘may’s’, ‘if’s’ and ‘just possible’s’, a case of seeking hopefully rather than arriving.
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Letters
Vol. 2 No. 20 · 16 October 1980
From Hermia Oliver
SIR: All his biographers agree that Juliet Herbert was important in Flaubert’s life, if only because the relationship endured so long. It therefore did not seem a pointless exercise to try to discover who she was. Your reviewer says (LRB, Vol. 2, No 18) ‘it is possible’ that she met Flaubert during short holidays she took in France. It is certain that she did so in 1872 and 1874 (see the evidence given on pages 115-17 and 120), and on the second occasion he took exactly the same steps to conceal this visit from ‘everyone’ as he took in later years to conceal visits to someone not named but ipso facto not a woman he could have been meeting openly. Admittedly, it cannot be proved who this woman was. All I have attempted to do is to Indicate some pointers to Juliet – in particular, the significant request in 1876 that Caroline should send her letters to Juliet to Flaubert, Juliet not knowing where she would be. The implication can only be that Flaubert would be in touch with her when Caroline was not.
As for the phrase ‘It is by now impossible to doubt the emotional nature of their relationship,’ it rests 1. on the ‘battement de coeur’ noted at the outset of the 1865 journey to London; 2. on Flaubert’s statement to Caroline in 1870 that now he had no one but her and Juliet; 3. on these numerous visits and on Flaubert’s own character; and 4. on the destruction of the letters.
Hermia Oliver
East Molesey, Surrey
