Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (November 2, 1808 – April 23, 1889), was a French novelist.

He was born at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte (Manche) in Normandy. In the 1850s, d'Aurevilly became literary critic of Le Pays. Paul Bourget describes him as a dreamer with an exquisite sense of vision, who sought and found in his work a refuge from the uncongenial world of every day. Jules Lemaître, a less sympathetic critic, finds in the extraordinary crimes of his heroes and heroines, his reactionary views, his dandyism and snobbery, an exaggerated Byronism.

Barbey d'Aurevilly is an extreme example of the eccentricities of which the Romanticists were capable, and to read him is to understand the discredit that fell upon the manner. He held extreme Catholic views and wrote on the most risqué subjects; he gave himself aristocratic airs and hinted at a mysterious past, though his parentage was entirely bourgeois and his youth very hum-drum and innocent.

Inspired by the glamorous past of Valognes, he set his works against the social pattern of aristocracy and peasantry of Normandy. Although he himself did not write in Norman, he encouraged the revival of vernacular literature in Normandy.

Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly died in Paris and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. In 1926 his remains were transferred to Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte's cemetery.

Works

• Une Vieille Maîtresse (An Old Mistress) (1851), attacked at the time of its publication on the charge of immorality
• L'Ensorcelée (The Bewitched) (1854), an episode of the royalist rising among the Norman peasants against the first republic
• Chevalier Destouches (1864)
• Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils) (1874), a collection of short stories, each of which relates a tale of a woman who commits acts of violence, crime, or revenge.

External links

1808 births | 1889 deaths | French novelists | Normans

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