Part Two
The people who wrote the books — their working lives, their quarrels, their correspondence, and the rooms they wrote in.
Michel de Montaigne retired to the tower of his château in 1571 and began writing the Essais, published in Bordeaux in 1580 — the first sustained exercise in personal reflection as literary form.
Writers
Flaubert worked on Madame Bovary from 1851 to 1856, famously agonising over every phrase in letters to Louise Colet.
Writers
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette published her first Claudine novels under her husband Willy's name between 1900 and 1903; the dispute over authorship and its resolution is a documented publishing history.
Writers
Arthur Rimbaud completed his major verse by 1872 and abandoned literature entirely by 1875, spending the rest of his life as a trader in Abyssinia.
Writers
Annie Ernaux has consistently rejected the label 'autofiction' for her work, insisting on a distinction between self-invention and self-documentation; L'Événement (2000) and Les Années (2008) are the two texts where she has made the argument most clearly.
Writers
Proust had the walls of his bedroom at 102 Boulevard Haussmann lined with cork in 1910 to block street noise, and worked there on À la recherche until 1919.
Writers