Raymond N. MacKenzie

By the last decades​ of the 19th century, Jules Verne was less a writer than a brand – one carefully cultivated by his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel – promising a specific mixture of scientific plausibility, adventure and moral instruction. ‘Jules Verne’ told readers roughly what they would get: a journey, maps, technological marvels, diagrams, rational wonder. A...

In​ 1842, with eight highly productive years of writing still ahead of him, Balzac wrote a preface to his Comédie humaine, which already comprised dozens of books. He defended the morality of the work, and revealed the scale of his ambition – nothing less than the creation of a complete picture of France in his time. As if wanting some credit, he remarked that it ‘was no...

’Like George Sand, Louise Colet spoke of Alfred de Musset often as a child, and worried about his health as he grew increasingly weak. She undoubtedly shared the opinion Sand expresses in Elle et lui, that artists need to be forgiven more readily than others, being subject to ‘more sudden enthusiasms’ and stronger fits of passion. Such an opinion is a harder sell today.