Anatole France, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921, wrote The Red Lily in 1894 as a witty and penetrating study of love, jealousy, and the artistic milieu of late-nineteenth-century Paris and Florence. The novel follows a married Parisian woman of the upper classes who embarks on a passionate affair with a poet during a journey to Tuscany.
France’s prose combines irony and lyricism in equal measure, and the Florentine setting gives the novel a rich cultural backdrop. Download this complete public-domain text as a free EPUB and discover one of French literary realism’s most elegant voices.