Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary is Flaubert’s masterpiece, initially a succès de scandale and now a landmark in European literature.

He took for his subject French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, and invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style to match. His heroine is Emma, a bored provincial housewife who abandons her husband Charles Bovary to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair.

‘Emma Bovary is the first in a procession of troubled and insubordinate young wives; the model for those adulterous bourgeois heroines – Thérèse Raquin, Anna Karenin, Hedda Gabler, Sue Bridehead, Ursula Brangwen and Molly Bloom,’ writes Geoffrey Wall in the introduction to his illuminating new translation. ‘We are drawn, with great skill, into a sustained imaginative contact with Emma. We feel that we are inside her head, under her skin, as we read.’