Stendhal was the founder of the French realist tradition, the first novelist to portray contemporary France in its social, cultural and economic reality, but his horizons reach well beyond France and the French, and were never anything less than decidedly European. He came to the novel relatively late in life when, at the age of 43, he wrote Armance (1827), which he describes as a ‘portrait’ of the Parisian salons of the day. It was followed three years later by Le Rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black), which is subtitled ‘Chronicle of 1830’ and famously defines the novel as ‘a mirror taken along a road’. In 1835, he abandoned his unfinished Lucien Leuwen, which recounts the life of a well-to-do young Parisian whose army commission takes him to provincial Nancy before returning him to the capital. La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839) describes contemporary Italy for the benefit of a contemporary French readership; and Stendhal's career as a novelist ends with the unfinished and, for many years, unpublished Lamiel, which narrates the adventures of a plucky young French woman who sets out from her native Normandy for Paris and adventure.

If contemporary France was the novelist Stendhal's chief literary subject, the literary context and the literary genealogy of his writing extended much further afield in time, place and genre. He regularly invokes Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto as his models for narrative; his reading as a child included the editions of Dante Alighieri left by his mother after her death, and Don Quixote, whose discovery he describes in his autobiography as the greatest moment of his life. The pamphlets he wrote in support of an emergent romanticism (Racine et Shakespeare, 1823, 1825) defended William Shakespeare against the indigenous classical tradition derived from Jean Racine; he regarded George Gordon Byron and Walter Scott as the chief representatives of literary modernity; and he claims in one of the articles he wrote for the English readers of the New Monthly Magazine (January 1826) that French literature could be reinvigorated only by taking its cue from Anglo-Saxon examples. Finally, the dedication of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma to ‘the happy few’ (in English in the original) comes from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and carries echoes of the St Crispin’s Day speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V.