Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province · Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners

Gustave Flaubert · 1857 (serialised 1856) · French

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What it is

Emma Rouault, a farmer's daughter raised in a convent on romantic novels, marries Charles Bovary, a plodding, devoted country doctor, and finds married life in small-town Normandy unbearably flat. Looking for the passion and luxury her books promised, she drifts into love affairs and buys on credit from a sly merchant, while her debts mount.

Why it matters

Prosecuted for obscenity and acquitted, Flaubert's first novel became the model of realist fiction, every sentence weighed and the author nowhere to be seen. Its cool irony and exact detail shaped Zola, Maupassant, Henry James and Joyce, and its heroine gave French the word bovarysme.

Reading it

About 350 pages. Medium difficulty: it asks for steady attention, but stands on its own.

Where to buy

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Your notes

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Influenced2

Built on it
Germinal · Émile Zola · 1885
Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, exercised an extraordinary influence over Zola, whose naturalism grew from that scrupulously truthful portraiture of life.
Wikipedia, Gustave Flaubert, Legacy
Built on it
The Metamorphosis · Franz Kafka · 1915
Kafka counted Flaubert among his blood relatives, and Nabokov judged Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, the greatest literary influence on Kafka's precise prose.
Wikipedia, Gustave Flaubert, Legacy; Wikidata, Q905 (P737)

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