Love (Penguin Classics)

Drawing on history, literature, and his own experience of unrequited passion, Love is a thinly disguised picture of the author's innermost feelings. Stendahl's obsession with Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski is at the heart of this book. For her part, she neither returned his love nor understood him. In an attempt to expain his feelings to her—and to exorcize his love—he dissects his passion. Bringing together the conflicting sides of his nature, the deeply emotional and the coolly analytical, Stendhal constructed a work that is both acutely personal and universally applicable. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. "A timeless treatise on the unique power of human emotion, Stendhal's "Love" is translated by Gilbert and Suzanne Sale with an introduction by Jean Stewart and B.C.J.G. "Knight" in "Penguin Classics". In 1818, when he was in his mid-thirties, Stendhal met and fell passionately in love with the beautiful Mathilde Dembowski. She, however, was quick to make it clear that she did not return his affections, and in his despair he turned to the written word to exorcise his love and explain his feelings. The result is an intensely personal dissection of the process of falling - and being - in love: a unique blend of poetry, anecdote, philosophy, psychology and social observation. Bringing together the conflicting sides of his nature, the deeply emotional and the coolly analytical, Stendhal created a work that is both acutely personal and universally applicable. This translation retains all the colour and passion of the original and is accompanied buy the author's original prefaces and appendices. In their introduction, Jean Stewart and B.C.J.G. "Knight" discuss the relationship between Stendhal and his beloved and explore his views on feminism, education and society. Stendhal (1783-1842) was the pseudonym of Henri Marie Beyle, born and raised in Grenoble. Offered a post in the Ministry of War, from 1800 onwards he followed Napoleon's campaigns throughout Europe before retiring to Italy. Here, as 'Stendhal', he began writing on art, music and travel. Though not well-received during his lifetime, his work, including "The Red and the Black" (1830) and "The Charterhouse of Parma" (1839), now places him among the pioneers of nineteenth-century literary realism. If you enjoyed "Love", you might like Gustave Flaubert's "Sentimental Education", also available in "Penguin Classics". "The single most insightful book on the role of imagination on love". (John Armstrong, author of "Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy")." --from book description, Amazon.com. Drawing on history, literature, philosophy and his own experience of unrequited passion, 'Love' is a thinly disguised picture of the author's innermost feelings. Stendhal's obsession with Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski is at the heart of this book. For her part, she neither returned his love nor understood him. In an attempt to explain his feelings to her--and to exorcize his love--he dissects his passion. Bringing together the conflicting sides of his nature, the deeply emotional and the coolly analytical, Stendhal constructed a work that is both acutely personal and universally applicable.

Translated by Gilbert and Suzanne Sale.

Of all his books, Love was Stendhal's favorite. Written at a critical time in his life when his own love had been rejected, the book is a thinly disguised picture of the author's innermost feelings. Though it ranges over a wide variety of topics from courtly love to the emancipation of women, central to the book is Stendhal's account of love - an intense, romantic and generally unrequited love. The nineteenth-century French master combined personal comment and detached analysis in this exploration of the aspects, stages, and varieties of love, particularly passionate, romantic, unrequited love, and the imagination's power to transfigure love's object and energies.