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.