Aurélia

Gérard de Nerval's greatest subject was himself. Throughout his tempestuous life that ended with suicide by hanging, this French Romantic poet journeyed to distant parts of the globe in order to comprehend and articulate the demons that assailed his inner-most being. The culmination of Nerval's quest was Aurélia, a masterful surrealistic prose dissection of mind and soul, completed only a year before his death in 1855. The partly autobiographical Aurélia, with Nerval as both narrator and protagonist, is a mind rending odyssey of cultural and spiritual exploration, shared by its tormented author and his spellbound readers. Nerval's search for the ideal woman, his fountainhead of grace and salvation, is personified in the distant Aurélia, based on his real-life obsession with the performer Jenny Colon.

With an Introduction and Notes by translator Monique DiDonna this version of Nerval's masterwork reveals one of the most haunting of nineteenth century literary works.