Henry James, an early and passionate admirer of Flaubert, considered the book a large step down from its famous predecessor. "Here the form and method are the same as in "Madame Bovary"; the studied skill, the science, the accumulation of material, are even more striking; but the book is in a single word a dead one. "Madame Bovary" was spontaneous and sincere; but to read its successor is, to the finer sense, like masticating ashes and sawdust. L'Education Sentimentale is elaborately and massively dreary. That a novel should have a certain charm seems to us the most rudimentary of principles, and there is no more charm in this laborious monument to a treacherous ideal than there is interest in a heap of gravel."
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, however, found it interesting, and made a map of the novel's social spaces, linking social organization to literary space. György Lukács in his Theory of the Novel found L'Education Sentimentale quintessentially modern in its handling of time as passing in the world and as perceived by the characters.