Émile Zola

This study is the first in English to stand beside F W J Hemmings’s great 1953 critical biography, Lethbridge matching his sensitivity to the period, breadth of perspective and frank admiration of Zola’s ferocious energy and integrity. Like all the best books of this kind, it makes us want to start reading Zola again. * Literary Review *
Lethbridge’s evocative, deeply felt biography is a tour de force of the biographical genre and a consummate study of the entanglements of Zola’s extraordinary life and his work. Through his nuanced plotting of the autobiographical, contextual, literary, and political determinants of his complex, often conflicted subject, Lethbridge illuminates the life trajectory of this iconic figure. * Professor Susan Harrow, Ashley Watkins Chair of French, University of Bristol *
Weaving together private and public lives, the act of writing and the works themselves, generations of scholarship and a compelling narrative, Robert Lethbridge brings his own great erudition and storytelling to this account of the life (and death) of Émile Zola. This is an engaging and brilliant new biography. * Sonya Stephens, President, The American University of Paris *
A compelling conclusion to a critical career which has unfolded over the last half century at the heart of Zola studies. * – Nicholas White, Professor of Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge *
Reveal[s] him to have been a fundamentally dynamic novelist – evolving in step with the tempo of the times, continually thinking and rethinking the past, the present, even the future. * The Critic *