Émile Zola

A book on the novels of Émile Zola. The first part covers most of the writing of the Rougon-Macquart novel sequence and the second part turns to the end of Zola's life and his exile in England.

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Everyone has heard of Zola, but not many people have read him. This book is quite simply designed to get you to want to, by taking a look at what is on offer, with so much more to discover.

Zola made it his aim to write novels exploring the many compartments and classes of modern French life in the later nineteenth century--and he went on to carry it out, with novels that look at the longings and troubles and everyday lives of just about every kind of person in their specific social settings. Travelling through the varieties of Zola's styles and subjects, realistic, comic, tragic, and critical, from shopping to mining to the fertility industry, the book is a guide to the different pleasures and modes of thinking to be found in reading Zola today.

It also considers the many kinds of story involved in the final years of Zola's own life, and in the wake of his untimely death in 1902 from asphyxiation. It follows him to England--to Upper Norwood, in south London, where he was in exile for almost a year in 1898-9, as a result of his intervention in the ongoing Dreyfus affair. Long letters home offer moving insights into Zola's whole way of being, in the intimacy of his daily life and his writing routines, set against the public events of the Dreyfus process that continue to resonate today.