For a Night of Love (12 page)

Emile Zola was born in April 1840 and grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where he befriended the artist, Paul Cézanne. In 1858, Zola moved to Paris with his mother. Despite her hopes that he would become a lawyer, he in fact failed his baccalaureate, and went on to work for the publisher Hachette, and to write literary columns and art reviews. He lost his job at Hachette on publication of his autobiographical novel,
La Confession de Claude
(1865), before his earliest venture into naturalistic fiction,
Thérèse Raquin
(1867). His series of over twenty volumes,
Les Rougon-Macquart
(1871–93) is a natural and social history of one family under the Second Empire in France, individual volumes exploring social ills and the influence of nature and nurture on human behaviour.
L'Assommoir
(1877) concerned drunkenness and the Parisian working-classes,
Nana
(1880) addressed sexual exploitation, and
Germinal
(1885) considered labour conditions. Other novel sequences followed, always entailing vast amounts of research.

Zola's later life as a writer was famously punctuated by his involvement in the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely accused of selling military secrets to the Germans. In a newspaper letter entitled ‘J'Accuse' (1898), Zola challenged the establishment and invited his own trial for libel, the author later removing briefly to England to escape the subsequent prison sentence. Emile Zola died in 1902, apparently asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes when asleep. Naturalism declined after his death, but his depictions of ‘Nature seen through a temperament' were an important influence on writers such as Theodore Dreiser and August Strindberg.

Andrew Brown studied at the University of Cambridge, where he taught French for many years. He now works as a freelance teacher and translator. He is the author of
Roland Barthes: the Figures of Writing
(OUP, 1993), and his translations include
Memoirs of a Madman
by Gustave Flaubert,
The Jinx
by Théophile Gautier,
Mademoiselle de Scudéri
by E.T.A. Hoffmann,
Theseus
by André Gide,
Incest
by Marquis de Sade,
The Ghost-seer
by Friedrich von Schiller,
Colonel Chabert
by Honoré de Balzac,
Memoirs of an Egotist
by Stendhal,
Butterball
by Guy de Maupassant,
With the Flow
by Joris-Karl Huysmans,
Life of Castruccio Castracani
by Machiavelli, and
A Fantasy of Dr Ox
by Jules Verne, all published by Hesperus Press.

SELECTED TITLES FROM HESPERUS PRESS