Margins
Madeleine book cover
Madeleine
1947
First Published
3.41
Average Rating
92
Number of Pages
Madeleine is the story of a great writer's marriage, a deeply disturbing account of André Gide's feelings towards his beloved and long-suffering wife. It was a relationship which Gide exalted―he termed it the central drama of his existence―yet deliberately shrouded in mystery. This was no ordinary marriage. Madeleine Rondeaux, two years older than her cousin André Gide, became his wife after Gide's first visit to Algeria. In his Journal, Gide refers to her as Emmanuèle or as Em. Only in this book, published a few months after his death, does Gide call her by her real name and painfully reveal the nature of their life together. All of Gide's vast work may be viewed as a confession, impelled by his need to write what he believed to be true about himself. In Madeleine this act of confession reaches a crowning point. It is a complex tale by a complex man about a complex relationship. “Ranks among the masterpieces of Gide's vibrating prose. It is also the most tragic personal document to have emanated from Gide's pen.”― New York Times .
Avg Rating
3.41
Number of Ratings
110
5 STARS
15%
4 STARS
30%
3 STARS
37%
2 STARS
15%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads

Author

Andre Gide
Andre Gide
Author · 44 books

André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars. Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation between the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straight-laced education and a narrow social moralism. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritan constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is informed by the same ethos, as suggested by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR. Chinese 安德烈·纪德

548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved
Madeleine