Portraying the frustrations and love affairs of a romantic young woman married to a dull provincial doctor, the novel is written in a superbly controlled style.

In 1856, after five years of work, Flaubert published his masterpiece, Madame Bovary, in a Paris journal. Nonetheless, he also became an established figure in the Parisian social and literary world. Because of a severe nervous malady, probably epilepsy, he spent much of his life at Croisset, near Rouen, with his mother and niece. The son of a surgeon, he studied law unsuccessfully in Paris and returned home to devote himself to writing. He was a scrupulous, slow writer, intent on the exact word ( le mot juste) and complete objectivity. Marie, in Frederick Brown's interpretation, is understood to be a fictionalised rendition of Eulalie Foucauld, the thirty-five-year-old Toulon innkeeper who provided Flaubert with his own sexual initiation in 1840.Flaubert, Gustave (güstävˈ flōbĕrˈ), 1821–80, French novelist, regarded as one of the supreme masters of the realistic novel. Brown concludes that it is a work of authorial adolescence. In his biography of Flaubert, Frederick Brown compares the narrator to other literary adolescents, such as Chateaubriand's René (1802), Abbé Prévost's Chevalier des Grieux (1731), Goethe's Werther (1734), Musset's Octave and others, who also fail to become adults due to their inability to reach maturity (psychological), although parents are not mentioned in November, unlike similar contemporary works.

The narrator takes up study toward a legal career, but has already eschewed marriage or professional life. In the concluding section of the novella, the adolescent narrator tries to revisit Marie, but the courtesan and her brothel of residence have vanished. However, as the reader later learns, she subsequently becomes a tabula rasa, providing her body for the enjoyment of men, but not her individuality or personality. In return for her acquiescence, though, she has acquired sexual freedom and experience. Initially, she was a virginal sixteen-year-old until she was unwillingly married to an elderly suitor who wanted a younger mistress. In the second part, the young author loses his virginity with Marie, a worldly-wise courtesan who recounts her personal story of erotic experience. He perceives himself as a voyeur, witnessing couples, sumptuous dining rooms, professionals at work and scenes of family life. In the first part of the novella, the narrator is a schoolboy, and the narrative consists of his meditations on life, as well as his longing for sexual awakening and the beginning of his adult life. November ( French: Novembre) was Gustave Flaubert's first completed work, a novella first completed in 1842.

Gustav flober