Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert(1857)
Novelc. 350 pages
“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”
One great work, every day
by Gustave Flaubert(1857)
“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”
Gustave Flaubert(1857)
Emma Bovary, provincial doctor's wife, reads too many romantic novels and seeks in adultery what her marriage cannot provide. Flaubert spent five years on this novel, sometimes agonizing over a single page for a week, and the prose is exact beyond anything that had come before. He was tried for obscenity; the trial made him famous. The novel created the template for realistic fiction: the detailed provincial world, the ironic distance, the free indirect style that moves in and out of consciousness. Emma's dreams destroy her. The prose remains perfect.