Adolphe and The Red Notebook

Benjamin Constant participated in the tumultous political life of France during the French Revolution and its aftermath. As an intimate of Germaine de Stael, he encountered international writers and thinkers influential in the early intellectual development of European Romanticism. Adolphe is a seminal Romantic novel, probably autobiographical, published in 1816. It analyses the interior states of the young protagonist who has fallen in love with an older woman. The Red Notebook is a posthumously published first-person autobiographical narrative of Constant's youth.