Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary is Flaubert's masterpiece, initially a succes de scandale and now a landmark in European literature.

He took for his subject French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, and invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style to match. His heroine is Emma, a bored provincial housewife who abandons her husband Charles Bovary to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. (back cover)