Although Gustave Flaubert's best known novel is Madame Bovary, many critics consider his later work, Sentimental Education, to be his masterpiece. It belongs to the type of realistic fiction that describes ordinary lives in detail, a genre at which Flaubert excelled. Sentimental Education paints the political and social background with such extraordinary fidelity that it is also a valuable record of the ideals and enthusiasms of a whole era. Telling the story of Frederic Moreau's unrequited lifelong love for another man's wife, Sentimental Education has always been considered a difficult and controversial book. Its original reviewers found the novel's form unsettling and its depiction of society amoral, and since then the novel has never had a lack of detractors and defenders.

William Paulson's original and challenging reading of Sentimental Education acknowledges the novel's difficulty and complexity, but insists on its ultimate readability. His interpretation emphasizes the novel's relation to its social context, its function as a commentary on romanticism and individualism, and the inauthenticity of both conservative and revolutionary ideology. In this thorough and extended reading of Sentimental Education, Paulson advances new arguments concerning the opening and closing of the novel, the purpose of Frederic Moreau's inconsistency, the structure of part 2, the characters of Dussardier and Senecal, and the similarity of Flaubert's treatment of events in 1848 to those of de Tocqueville and Marx. In addition, this study provides an introduction to Flaubert's narrative technique and situates both the novel and its protagonists in the artistic production of the nineteenth century.