Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners is the debut novel of the French writer Gustave Flaubert, originally published in 1856 and 1857. The novel was first serialised in the Revue de Paris between 1 October and 15 December 1856, and public prosecutors attacked it as obscene, which produced a trial in January 1857 that made the book notorious.

Flaubert was acquitted on 7 February 1857, and the novel became a bestseller in April of that year when it appeared in two volumes. It was translated into English by Eleanor Marx in 1886. The story follows Emma Bovary, who marries a country doctor named Charles and then finds provincial life intolerable, an attitude the novel presents through the objects and expenses she accumulates rather than through argument.

The book is a seminal work of literary realism and is ranked among Flaubert's masterpieces. Its subjects list adultery, the middle class, physicians' spouses, married women and suicide, which is the frame in which Emma's dissatisfaction is examined: the novel is less interested in judging her than in showing how a person consumes her way towards a catastrophe she can see coming and cannot stop.