Molière premiered Le Misanthrope in 1666 at the Palais-Royal in Paris. Alceste, a man of genuine moral seriousness who cannot tolerate the flattery and social performance that French aristocratic society runs on, has managed to engage himself in a lawsuit and a love affair simultaneously, both of which his principles are about to lose him. His lawsuit is against a man he could defeat by simply being politic with the right people; his love for Célimène, a beautiful young widow whose social intelligence consists in keeping multiple admirers entertained, is entirely incompatible with the total honesty he demands from others and claims to practice himself. The play ends with Alceste's withdrawal from society and Célimène's refusal to follow him.
The play's classification as a comedy is useful and misleading in equal measure. Alceste loses everything of practical value in the course of five acts while making arguments that are partly correct and entirely impractical. Molière does not make him ridiculous in the way that Harpagon in The Miser is ridiculous, he is not deluded about the world, only about his capacity to change it through personal example. The friendship with Philinte, who accepts the social rituals Alceste despises without approving of them, is Molière's structural device for keeping the play in equilibrium: Philinte is rational, likable, and slightly complicit in the world Alceste is fighting, which prevents either position from becoming simply correct.
The Misanthrope holds up because the question it poses, whether the person who refuses social compromise is heroic or merely self-defeating, is not settled within the play and remains live outside it. Alceste's insistence on saying exactly what he thinks regardless of social consequences is presented as both admirable and absurd, and the combination reflects something true about the condition of moral seriousness in social life. Molière wrote it at the height of his career at the French court, in a position where he had to manage the same contradictions Alceste refuses to manage, which gives the play a biographical tension its audiences have always sensed.
Jane Austen wrote all six major novels without a dedicated writing room, she hid her work under blotting paper whenever visitors arrived.
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