Why study a lan­guage like French? For the unpar­al­leled plea­sure, of course, of read­ing a beloved, respect­ed, and endur­ing nov­el like Madame Bovary in the orig­i­nal — or so lit­er­ar­i­ly inclined Fran­cophiles might argue. After all, they’d rhetor­i­cal­ly ask, can you real­ly say you’ve read the book if you haven’t actu­al­ly read the very same words Gus­tave Flaubert wrote? But now, lit­er­ar­i­ly inclined Fran­cophiles who also have an enthu­si­asm for the web (not an over­whelm­ing­ly large group, wags may point out) can insist that you haven’t real­ly read Madame Bovary unless you’ve read it all in the orig­i­nal: all 4,500 pages of it. Yes, the French do tend to write longer sen­tences than most, but that impres­sive length has less to do with a nation­al lit­er­ary style than with thor­ough­go­ing com­pletism, an impulse that brings togeth­er all of the 1856 nov­el­’s orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished pages as well as all of those cut, cen­sored, or revised, free to read online at bovary.fr.

“After a marathon effort of tran­scrip­tion by 130 vol­un­teers from all over the world, includ­ing a clean­ing lady, an oil prospec­tor and sev­er­al teenagers,” writes the Inde­pen­dent’s John Lich­field, “all the vari­ants of Gus­tave Flaubert’s mas­ter­piece can be con­sult­ed on a new web­site. This is believed to be the first time that the com­plete process of cre­ation, and pub­li­ca­tion, of a clas­sic nov­el has been made avail­able on the inter­net,” much less on a site that “con­tains not only the pub­lished text and images of the bare­ly leg­i­ble man­u­scripts but inter­ac­tive con­trols which allow the read­er to re-instate pas­sages cor­rect­ed or cut by Flaubert or his pub­lish­ers.” Despite this unprece­dent­ed­ly vast and acces­si­ble trove of Madame Bovary resources, strug­gles over the prop­er inter­pre­ta­tion of the once-scan­dalous nov­el will doubt­less only con­tin­ue, not only at the lev­el of just which word Flaubert intend­ed to write on the fourth draft of a par­tic­u­lar­ly cru­cial para­graph, but at the lev­el of whether to con­sid­er the whole book tragedy, com­e­dy, or some­thing in between. Enter the Madame Bovary Archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

As Pride and Prej­u­dice Turns 200, Read Jane Austen’s Man­u­scripts Online

See F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­scripts for The Great Gats­by, This Side of Par­adise & More

The Online Emi­ly Dick­in­son Archive Makes Thou­sands of the Poet’s Man­u­scripts Freely Avail­able

James Joyce Man­u­scripts Online, Free Cour­tesy of The Nation­al Library of Ire­land

Mary Shelley’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­scripts of Franken­stein Now Online for the First Time

The Com­plete Works of Leo Tol­stoy Online: New Archive Will Present 90 Vol­umes for Free (in Russ­ian)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

We’ve long known the inter­net’s pow­er to facil­i­tate access to the great books (see, for instance, our col­lec­tion of 600 eBooks free online), but recent projects like the British Library’s Dis­cov­er­ing Lit­er­a­ture have shown us that it can also help us engage with those great books. The site, says a MetaFil­ter user who goes under Horace Rumpole, offers “a por­tal to dig­i­tized col­lec­tions and sup­port­ing mate­r­i­al. The first install­ment, Roman­tics and Vic­to­ri­ans, includes work from Austen, the Bron­tës, Dick­ens, and Blake, and forth­com­ing mod­ules will expand cov­er­age of the site to encom­pass every­thing from Beowulf to the present day.” For now, if you enjoy clas­sic Eng­lish Roman­tic and Vic­to­ri­an nov­els, pre­pare to take that enjoy­ment to a high­er lev­el by immers­ing your­self in all man­ner of ear­ly man­u­scripts, authors’ papers and per­son­al effects, and relat­ed pieces of con­tem­po­rary media.

If you count your­self a Jane Austen fan, for instance, you can now scroll down her Dis­cov­er­ing Lit­er­a­ture author page and find “a host of texts” to do with her life, her work, and the inter­sec­tion between them, “includ­ing the opin­ions — most­ly pos­i­tive — her friends and fam­i­ly had of her nov­els, copied out by the author (though ‘her imme­di­ate fam­i­ly is shown to have dis­agreed over which of her books was bet­ter’).” That comes from The Guardian’s Ali­son Flood, writ­ing up the site’s col­lec­tion of not just Austen accou­trements but items from writ­ers like William Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, and Mary Shel­ley, “as well as diaries, let­ters, news­pa­per clip­pings from the time and pho­tographs, in an attempt to bring the peri­od to life.”

Flood cites “a sur­vey of more than 500 Eng­lish teach­ers, which found that 82% believe sec­ondary school stu­dents ‘find it hard to iden­ti­fy’ with clas­sic authors” on their class­es’ syl­labi. In response, Dis­cov­er­ing Lit­er­a­ture appears to have giv­en spe­cial atten­tion to oft-assigned writ­ers like Charles Dick­ens, whose col­lec­tion of mate­ri­als on the site includes a lit­er­ary sketch pub­lished at age 23, col­or illus­tra­tions for both an 1885 and 1911 edi­tion of Oliv­er Twist (as well as the 1848 review that destroyed his rela­tion­ship with the book’s pre­vi­ous illus­tra­tor), and “The Ital­ian Boy,” an ear­ly work of jour­nal­ism on “a bru­tal crime that occurred in Lon­don in 1831, a ‘copy-cat’ mur­der fol­low­ing upon those of the infa­mous Burke and Hare in Edin­burgh.” The site’s archives also con­tain ana­lyt­i­cal essays on each writer’s body of work, like “Oliv­er Twist and the Work­house” and “Sta­tus, Rank, and Class in Jane Austen’s Nov­els” — ide­al for when these re-enthused stu­dents, pre­vi­ous­ly unable to con­nect to the Roman­tic and Vic­to­ri­an eras’ most respect­ed authors, reach grad school.

The image at the very top shows the ear­li­est known writ­ings of Char­lotte Bron­të.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

15-Year-Old Jane Austen Writes a Satir­i­cal His­to­ry Of Eng­land: Read the Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script Online (1791)

Read Jane Austen’s Man­u­scripts Online

Charles Dick­ens’ Hand-Edit­ed Copy of His Clas­sic Hol­i­day Tale, A Christ­mas Car­ol

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

An Online Gallery of 30,000 Items from The British Library, Includ­ing Leonar­do da Vinci’s Note­books And Mozart’s Diary

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.