Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is one of the most influential - and scandalous - novels of the nineteenth century. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with an introduction by Geoffrey Wall, with a preface by Michele Roberts.

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert’s erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: ‘Madame Bovary, c'est moi.’

‘Its beauty is enchanting and terrible’ - A.S. Byatt, author of Possession

‘An extraordinarily innovative work: its style was at once ironic and lyrical, detached and passionate, ambiguous and precise’ - Kate Summerscale