Madame Bovary

Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary, a plodding country doctor, expecting the grand passions she absorbed from sentimental novels. Provincial life gives her none of it. Bored and restless, she pursues romance through two affairs and a spree of debt her husband never suspects, chasing an ideal that reality keeps refusing to supply. Flaubert’s 1857 novel is a founding work of literary realism, built from patient, exact observation and famously careful sentences. Its frank treatment of adultery led to an obscenity trial, which Flaubert won, and the book has been read ever since as both a portrait of one woman’s ruin and a critique of the illusions a whole society sells itself. Available here as a free PDF and EPUB edition.