Madame Bovary

Bored and beautiful, Emma Bovary is frustrated by the banality of provincial life in 19th Century France. Her marriage to a mediocre doctor cannot match the glittering, passion-filled romances of the sentimental novels she devours and, to escape the triteness of the life that surrounds her, she eventually, and scandalously, begins affair after affair. Unfortunately, even these affairs fail to live up to her romantic expectations and the reality of life is repeatedly set against her romantic fantasies. This very lifelike portrayal of women in provincial France created a furor when first published, and continues to fascinate now.

Flaubert meticulously and mercilessly depicts not only Emma Bovary’s faults and flaws in all their trite reality but also those of the society that has both created and damned her. Is she a romantic heroine or bourgeois neurotic? Emma Bovary is the enduringly enigmatic protagonist of this French classic.