J. Barbey d'Aurevilly
1808–1889
Biography
Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (1808–1889) worked in France as a novelist, poet, storyteller and critic. He was born at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in Lower Normandy, studied law at Caen, and made his career in Paris, where he built a public persona as a dandy with an air of aristocratic mystery. He began as a liberal atheist and turned to Catholicism in 1846, a change that shaped much of what he wrote afterwards.
From the early 1850s he was an influential critic for the Bonapartist paper Le Pays, where he helped revive the reputation of Balzac and championed Stendhal, Flaubert and Baudelaire. As a novelist he set many of his stories among the old Norman aristocracy, drawing on the town of Valognes, and he specialised in tales of hidden motive that hint at evil without turning into ghost stories. The decadent writers of the late nineteenth century admired him, and later authors such as Henry James and Marcel Proust were in his debt.
The book on this site is Les diaboliques, a set of six stories first published in 1874. Its concern with crime, secret guilt and concealed motives is the territory he made his own, and it is a fair place to start with an author whose Catholic convictions and taste for the scandalous sit side by side in his work.
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Books
Les diaboliques
by J. Barbey d'Aurevilly
Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils) is a collection of short stories written by Barbey d'Aurevilly and published in France in 1874. Each story features a woman who commits an act of violence, or revenge, or some other crime. It is considered d'Aurevilly's masterpiece. This book…
Summary from Wikipedia: Les Diaboliques (short story collection) (CC BY-SA 4.0)