The Roman Tales

Stendhal

Nov 2012 · Sold by HarperCollins UK

About this ebook

A contemporary collection of stories by one of France’s finest writers.

Revered by key literary figures including as Balzac and Mérimée, Stendhal is best known for his novels, but his shorter works were just as powerful. In this brand new translation, Susan Ashe brings his greatest Italian stories to the modern reader, whilst staying true to Stendhal’s style and brilliance.

The collection includes:

- The Abbess of Castro
- Vittoria Accordamboni
- The Cenci
- Along with accompanying essays by Charles Dickens, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Stendhal himself.

Together, these stories convey Stendhal’s love of Italy and admiration for the society’s honesty, sincerity, and above all, passion. ‘Roman Tales’ will reaffirm Stendhal as one of the great French masters of the 19th Century.

About the author

One of the great French novelists of the nineteenth century, Stendhal (pseudonym for Marie-Henri Beyle) describes his unhappy youth with sensitivity and intelligence in his autobiographical novel The Life of Henri Brulard. It was written in 1835 and 1836 but published in 1890, long after his death. He detested his father, a lawyer from Grenoble, France, whose only passion in life was making money. Therefore, Stendhal left home as soon as he could. Stendhal served with Napoleon's army in the campaign in Russia in 1812, which helped inspire the famous war scenes in his novel The Red and the Black (1831). After Napoleon's fall, Stendhal lived for six years in Italy, a country he loved during his entire life. In 1821, he returned to Paris for a life of literature, politics, and love affairs. Stendhal's novels feature heroes who reject any form of authority that would restrain their sense of individual freedom. They are an interesting blend of romantic emotionalism and eighteenth-century realism. Stendhal's heroes are sensitive, emotional individuals who are in conflict with the society in which they live, yet they have the intelligence and detachment to analyze their society and its faults. Stendhal was a precursor of the realism of Flaubert. He once described the novelist's function as that of a person carrying a mirror down a highway so that the mirror would reflect life as it was, for all society. Editor and translator Norman Thomas Di Giovanni was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1933. He graduated from Antioch College in 1955 and met Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges in 1967. He collaborated with Borges on English versions of ten of his books. The first, The Book of Imaginary Beings, was published in 1969.