Madame Bovary is one of the most influential novels of the 19th century and a prime example of French Realism.The novel is a social study and the beginning of the age of Realism in literary history. He did this by taking the role of an omniscient and impersonal narrator, who describes the romantic inner life of the main character, and contrasting it with the hopeless and rather dismal reality of her life.

With Madame Bovary, Flaubert created one of the first truly modern novels and pre-empted some of the innovative narrative forms of the 20th century. What upset the public most about Flaubert’s novel was that at no point did he take sides or condemn his protagonist’s actions. Madame Bovary is the story of Emma Bovary, a doctor’s wife whose passions and romantic notions drive her to start an affair, accumulate debts, entangle herself in lies and, in the end, commit suicide. This complete and unabridged edition features the classic translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling.In 1856, the relatively unknown French author Gustave Flaubert caused outrage with what was to become one of the most influential novels of literary history.

Madame Bovary remains a touchstone for literary discussions of provincial life and adultery as well as a summit of prose art, a pioneering work of realism that forever changed the way novels are written. She marries a kind but dull country doctor and discovers that 'This life of hers was as cold as an attic that looks north and boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart.' Emma Bovary's quest for escape from the emptiness of her bourgeois existence leads to infidelity and financial extravagance, and Gustave Flaubert's powerful and deeply moving examination of her moral degeneration is universally regarded as a landmark of nineteenth-century fiction.įlaubert was brought to trial by the French government on the grounds of this novel's alleged immorality but narrowly escaped conviction. At convent school, a girl acquires romantic notions of a lover who will live for her alone.

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