The Life and Times of Emile Zola

Controversy surrounded Zola during his life-time, and controversy has followed him ever since. No other French writer was so violently attacked by contemporaries, none had a more devoted following. This high priest of Naturalism scandalized France by the frankness of his treatment of the seamier side of human nature and electrified the whole of Europe and America by his denunciation of the military establishment of his country over the Dreyfus case. His reputation has remained in dispute ever since his mysterious death in 1902, some critics arguing his work's consistently high and original literary quality, others its undue reliance on cheap sensationalism.

Frederick William John Hemmings was born in Southampton in 1920. Hemmings served in the Second World War, decrypting German codes in the Army Intelligence Corps, but in 1946 he returned to academic life in Oxford, completing his DPhil in 1949, a groundbreaking study that was published the following year by Oxford University Press: The Russian Novel in France 1884-1914.
Hemmings made his mark as a pioneer of Zola studies and is known as the foremost Zola critic in the English-speaking world. Further studies on Zola and Stendhal were published in later years, as were books on two other major 19th-century French writers: The King of Romance: A Portrait of Alexandre Dumas (1979) and Baudelaire the Damned (1982). This project of Balzacian and Zolaesque proportions was realised all the more remarkably during a busy nine-year term of office as head of the French department at Leicester University, where he was a hugely respected literary scholar. Hemmings was twice married and left behind one son and one daughter when he died in Leicester in 1997.

Prefatory Note
Introduction
1 Father and Son
2 Aix-en-province
3 Lost Illusions
4 Cezanne and Gabrielle
5 The Publishing Business
6 The Art Critic
7 Zola and Manet
8 Beginnings and Endings
9 From the Commune to L'Assommoir
10 Friends and Disciples
11 The Lure of the Stage
12 Portrait of the Man
13 Portrait of the Writer
14 Zola and the Impressionists
15 Jeanne
16 A Double Life
17 London, Lourdes and Rome
18 Ends and Means: The Dreyfus Affair
19 Zola on Trial
20 The English Scene
21 A New Century
Notes