Madame Bovary

Emma, a farmer's daughter raised on romantic novels, marries Charles Bovary, a kind and dull country doctor in Normandy, and soon finds married life nothing like the books. Seeking passion and luxury, she takes lovers, buys beautiful things on credit from a scheming merchant, and sinks deeper into debt and disappointment.

When the novel was serialised in 1856, Flaubert was put on trial for offending public morals and acquitted. He worked for years on every sentence, and his precise, ironic style made Madame Bovary a model for the modern novel. Its portrait of a woman trapped by her dreams and her society remains painfully alive.

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), the son of a surgeon in Rouen, gave up studying law after a nervous illness and spent most of his life at his family's house at Croisset on the Seine. In 1849 he travelled for nearly two years through Egypt and the Middle East, a journey whose colours run through Salammbô.

He worked for years on each book, shouting his sentences aloud to test them, in search of the exact word. Madame Bovary brought him a trial and fame, and Sentimental Education followed. He was a mentor to Maupassant and a friend of Turgenev.