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boldly sought to redefine the aesthetics of French theater; it raised the Romantic flag against the constraining tenets of classical drama. Hernani, with its revolutionary use of poetic language and mixture of dramatic modes, put this new vision to the test, and the spectacular polemic that swirled around the play brought Hugo, despite past failures such as Amy Robsart (1828), to the forefront of the theater scene. In addition, poetry (the genre in which Hugo had first distinguished himself by winning, at age seventeen, a prestigious award for his ode on the re-erection of a statue of Henri IV, and which put bread on his table with one of the last royal pensions in the 1820s) continued to occupy him, as did the literary criticism in which he increasingly engaged.

What is less evident in Adèle’s account of The Hunchback’s composition are the events of Hugo’s personal life, which undoubtedly had an effect on his concentration—be they salutary, such as the birth of the couple’s second daughter, Adèle, in late July 1830, or troubling, such as problems in the Hugo marriage that stemmed from his wife’s nascent affair with Hugo’s close friend, the poet and literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Equally unaddressed—or at the very least underaddressed—is a certain hesitancy on Hugo’s part regarding the genre of the novel. Although writing The Hunchback was appealing in that it would bring money to the growing family’s coffer, Hugo was keenly aware that the novel was generally considered a frivolous literary form. Even as it was already showing by its suppleness to be the genre perhaps best suited to reflect the concerns of the new society born of the French Revolution, and in spite of efforts in the form undertaken in the first decades of the nineteenth century by respected writers such as Benjamin Constant, François-Rene de Chateaubriand, and Madame de Staël, the novel was nonetheless still perceived in the 1820s as a minor genre and lagged in importance far behind poetry and theater, which were both steeped in classical tradition and prestige.

Prior to The Hunchback of Notre Dame Hugo had already written and published three novels—Han d‘Islande (Han of Iceland, 1823), Bug-Jargal (1826), and Le Dernier Jour d’un condamne à mort (The Last Day of a Condemned Man, 1829). Yet each of these examples was more a response to personal or growing social preoccupations than an effort to practice or elevate the genre: Han of Iceland, a Gothic tale of thwarted young lovers, plays out Hugo’s own love story with Adèle (he once said that she was the only person who was meant to understand it). Bug-Jargal, which centers on an episode from the then recent past—a violent 1791 slave revolt in Santo Domingo (present-day Haiti)—had its origins in a school bet in which Hugo was challenged to compose a novel in a period of two weeks. The Last Day of a Condemned Man, a first-person narrative that follows a man through prison to the guillotine, was a polemically charged effort to bring awareness to the horrors of the death penalty. Hugo’s first novelistic endeav ors can be understood as rather isolated attempts to give voice to private or socially oriented concerns. One unifying influence on Hugo’s early novel writing is, however, indisputable—that of the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, author of Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1818), Ivanhoe (1819), and Quentin Durward (1823). Scott’s mastery of the historical novel brought the genre quickly into vogue and helped, in the 1820s, to advance the merits of the novel as a literary form. Staunch and fervent admirers—among them Honoré de Balzac, the future author of La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy)—declared themselves, and French historical novels, such as Alfred de Vigny’s Cinq-Mars (1826) and Prosper Mérimée’s Chronique du règne de Charles IX (Chronicle of the Reign of Charles the Ninth, 1829), began to appear and garner attention. In the same way that nature inspired introspection and reflection in Romantic poetry, history served as the fertile terrain of the Romantic novel. Whether this renewed