Extract

She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.

A young woman reads too many novels and marries a dull provincial doctor, expecting rapture. What she receives instead is Yonville, a life of numbing routine, and a hunger that no affair or purchase can ever satisfy. Flaubert spent five years polishing every sentence of his 1857 debut, seeking le mot juste with a devotion that bordered on mania, and the result is a novel so precisely observed it changed what fiction could do. Emma Bovary's romantic delusions are rendered with a sympathy inseparable from surgical irony. He was prosecuted for offending public morality and acquitted, but the real scandal was artistic: he had made the ordinary tragic and the banal beautiful. Every realist novel written since exists in the wake of this one.