Fan Casting Amaury

A romantic novel (with moments of both tragedy and comedy) on the general theme of jealousy, set in the countryside outside Paris in 1838-39. In Amaury, Dumas attempts an artistic dissection of jealousy, but all his characters keep turning into Alexandre Dumas, (who finds jealousy an unworthy emotion) and rise above it. Amaury is also of interest as Dumas' sole attempt at an epistolary novel, a form that (as this book shows) Dumas found uncongenial, since he kept abandoning the epistolary format for straight narration, and all of the letters read as if written by the same person, which, of course, they were.