Gustave Flaubert
I’m reading Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education at the moment and its one of those books which contains lots of real-life geographical references. Apart from the many locations in Paris, the authors places his characters in French towns such as Le Havre, Auteuil, Chartres, and Nogent Sur Seine. In the opening chapters there is a lovely description of a boat ride up the River Seine which you can follow very succesfully in Google Earth.
I’ve written before about how I enjoy using Google Maps and other resources such as flickr to find the various locations mentioned in books and I’ve found I’m not alone, having just discovered that Peter Biggins of Norwalk Community College, Connecticut has produced a website Maps of the Classics, which provides location maps for a fascinating selection of books including A Passage to India, The Power and the Glory, The Mill on the Floss, and Anna Karenina to name but a few.
Sentimental Education is included and when you click on a map icon you get a little text box saying for example, “Where Frédéric got off the steamer and the Arnoux family continued on”.
You can zoom in and out of the map using the usual buttons and this allows the site to cover a lot of detail in areas of Paris but also show distant towns such as Le Havre.
I am sure the Internet’s resources for mapping books is limitless and I’m probably just scratching the surface but the ‘net takes armchair travelling to a whole new level.
[...] than one for every two days–it’s called hyperlexia, and also suffered by people such as blogger A Common Reader, writing and mapping for us, beautifully, among other writers, Flaubert) it was Scarry’s I read [...]
this looks like a great idea ,hope it is expanded ,be great to go to a city and see where books where written and set ,flaubert is such a great right be fun following this ,warmest stu
It’s a very seductive idea, to wander the streets of Paris retracing the steps of Frederic and other fictional characters.
I suspect that it’s possible to download these maps to iPhones too.
Lisa
Thanks for visiting!
Yes, If you had an iphone with GPS (I don’t, although my kids do) then you could let the thing guide you from one site to another. Ah, technology . . .
Thanks for the comment – I think there are plenty more of these set up as Google Maps but I’ve not been able to find them yet.
The maps would be great for Zola and Balzac novels. What a wonderful idea
This will help the literary travelling no end.
I have a wonderful literary travel story. One of the members of my Jane Austen group was in Chawton and visited the church. She decided that Jane Austen must have sat in that church so she proceed to sit in EVERY seat in that church so she could say she’d sat where JA sat! She then went outside the church and read that the original one had burnt down a few decades after Jane Austen’s death!! We decided that at least the pews had receiving a good dusting and polishing!
Hilarious. I suspect the pews would have been changed in the meantime anyway!