Madame Bovary

Emma Rouault is a farmer's daughter raised on romantic novels who marries Charles Bovary, a dull, devoted, second-rate country doctor, expecting marriage to deliver the passion her books had promised. Instead she finds the long gray monotony of provincial France — the dinners, the gossip, the adoring husband who bores her without rest. To escape the emptiness she reaches for love and luxury: first the calculating landowner Rodolphe, who seduces and abandons her; then the timid clerk Léon; and all the while the secret debts she signs to the moneylender Lheureux, until they swell past any hope of payment and close on her like a trap.

First serialized in 1856 and published as a book in 1857, Madame Bovary arrived by way of a courtroom: Flaubert was prosecuted for offending public morality and acquitted, and the scandal made the novel famous overnight. What raises it far above a tale of a fallen woman is Flaubert's refusal to judge. With glasslike prose — the fruit of his obsessive search for le mot juste — and the new technique of free indirect style, he slips into Emma's mind without ever telling us what to think of her, leaving the verdict entirely to the reader. The great agricultural-fair scene, where seductions and livestock prizes are bawled out in the same breath, remains one of the supreme set-pieces in all of fiction.

Out of Emma's self-deception came the word bovarysme — the human habit of mistaking the daydream for the life — and out of Flaubert's impersonal, exact, unsentimental method came the modern novel itself. Critics have long called it the first truly modern work of fiction and the founding book of literary realism.

This edition pairs the complete public-domain English translation — made by Eleanor Marx-Aveling, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, and the first into English — with an editor's foreword on the novel's trial, technique, and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.