For Further Reading

You can probably glean from my references in the podcast that Hugo’s corpus of writing is vast. Included here are only his long-form, published, prose fiction works, of which he published the first when he was 16 years old, and the last when he was 72.

• Bug-Jargal (1818)

• Han d'Islande (Hans of Iceland) (1823)

• Le Dernier jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man) (1829)

• Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1831)

• Claude Gueux (1834) 

• Les Misérables (1862)

• Les Travailleurs de la Mer (The Toilers of the Sea) (1866)

• L'Homme qui rit (The Man Who Laughs) (1869)

• Quatrevingt-treize (Ninety-Three) (1874)

For obvious reasons, I only focus in the podcast on those details of Hugo’s life (1802-1885 – a busy 83 years) that are relevant to Les Misérables in one way or another; these sources will give you a fuller picture. 

• Matthew Josephson. Victor Hugo, a realistic biography of the great romantic. Doubleday, Doran & co., 1942.  

• Joanna Richardson, Victor Hugo. St. Martin's Press, 1976.

• Graham Robb. Victor Hugo: A Biography. W W Norton & Co., 1998.

• Bradley Stephens. Victor Hugo (Critical Lives). Reaktion Books, 2019.

This is the tip of an enormous iceberg. I’m focusing on texts that are primarily, or at least significantly about Les Misérables, written or available in English, and only books – this is to give you a manageable starting place. 

First, a few books that have a similar audience in mind to the one I was thinking of when writing this podcast – that is, non-specialists – but are analysis written by folks with expertise. If you enjoyed what I did here, you are also likely to enjoy these. 

• Marva A. Barnett. To Love Is to Act: Les Misérables and Victor Hugo’s Vision for Leading Lives of Conscience. Swan Isle Press, 2020.

• David Bellos. The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

• Kathryn M. Grossman. Les Miserables: Conversion, Revolution, Redemption (Twayne's Masterwork Studies). Twayne, 1996.

• Mario Vargas Llosa. The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables. Princeton UP, 2007

Finally, some texts that might be a more challenging read, because they’re written with a primarily academic specialist audience in mind, so they assume a greater knowledge of and fluency with theory and/or literary criticism, and some of these studies juxtapose Les Misérables with other texts as well. But they’re significant in the study of Les Misérables, and will have bibliographies that are fun to explore. Again, just some places to start.

• Victor Brombert. Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel. Harvard UP, 1984.

• Kathryn M. Grossman. Figuring Transcendence in Les Misérables: Hugo’s Romantic Sublime. Southern Illinois UP, 1994.

• Kathryn M. Grossman & Bradley Stephens, eds. Les Misérables and Its Afterlives: Between Page, Stage, and Screen. Routledge, 2015.

• Isabel Roche. Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo. Purdue UP, 2006. 

If you want more, an academic library can direct you to the truly overwhelming body of research on Hugo and his writing – many, many other books, plus journal articles, conference proceedings, etc. – in any language you might want it in. Plus, each of the sources here (as well as some editions of Hugo’s novels) will include bibliographies or “further reading” lists as well! And, you can always explore other work by the same authors, especially those who appear here more than once – they are respected scholars of Hugo, and write about him elsewhere.