Foreword by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, creators of the musical Les Misérables
Chicago: Swan Isle Press,  2020.
Distributed by the University of Chicago Press.        256 pages | 34 halftones | 6 x 9 | $30
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“To love is to act”— “Aimer, c’est agir.”  These words, which Victor Hugo wrote three days before he died, epitomize his life’s philosophy. His love of freedom, democracy, and all people—especially the poor and wretched—drove him not only to write his epic Les Misérables but ...

Victor Hugo’s work, so modern in vision, still compels. In Victor Hugo on Things That Matter, Marva Barnett invites English speakers who read French to engage with the thoughts, feelings, and art of a literary genius—and with the beauty and power of his original French. Hugo’s arguments against the death penalty are those used today. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame perennially inspires filmmakers. Les Misérables  remains a popular favorite, both as Hugo’s novel and as the world’s longest-running musical.  But these are just a few waves in the Hugolian sea of ideas. Hugo called geniuses “men-oceans,” saying that looking into their souls was tantamount to plumbing the depths of the sea. With this ...

For over fifty years Victor Hugo’s lover and friend, former actress Juliette Drouet, wrote him about 22,000 letters, sometimes as many as five a day. In Lettres inédites de Juliette Drouet à Victor Hugo, Gérard Pouchain (specialist in both Drouet and Hugo) and Marva Barnett published and annotated for the first time 105 of Juliette’s letters found in these American libraries: the Pierpont Morgan Rare Book Library, Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Harvard University’s Houghton Library, and the University of Syracuse Library.