Madame Bovary: Introduction by Victor Brombert [Hardcover]

Emma, a passionate dreamer raised in the French countryside, is ready for her life to take off when she marries the decent, dull Dr. Charles Bovary. Marriage, however, fails to live up to her expectations, which are fueled by sentimental novels, and she turns disastrously to love affairs. The story of Emma’s adultery scandalized France whenMadame Bovarywas first published. Today, the heartbreaking story of Emma’s financial ruin remains just as compelling.

InMadame Bovary, his story of a shallow, deluded, unfaithful, but consistently compelling woman living in the provinces of nineteenth-century France, Gustave Flaubert invented not only the modern novel but also a modern attitude toward human character and human experience that remains with us to this day.

One of the rare works of art that it would be fair to call perfect,Madame Bovaryhas had an incalculable influence on the literary culture that followed it. This translation, by Francis Steegmuller, is acknowledged by common consensus as the definitive English rendition of Flaubert’s text.

“[Madame Bovaryis] a surprisingly romantic and deeply moving text, as well as a work of pioneering modernity. . . Flaubert’s anti-heroic heroine in fact acquires a haunting nobility through her relentless quest for the absolute of experience.” –from the Introduction by Victor BrombertGustave Flaubert grew up in Rouen and did not leave his birth city until he was nineteen when he went to study law in Paris. After three years, however, Flaubert abandoned law and began writing. His first finished work was November, a novella. In September 1849, Flaubert completed the first version of a novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. His exploration of themes of spiritual torment was just the beginning of Flaubert's controversial subject choices. His frank and realistic display of the sex, adultery and other goings-on in bourgeois lÄ