Madame Bovary

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Published as a serial in the Revue de Paris between October and December 1856, Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary is the tragic story of Emma Bovary, a young woman who struggles to reconcile fantasies of romance and sensual escapism with the stifling restrictions of life as a housewife in provincial France. One of the most revered works of French literature, the book was highly controversial when it was released. Critics attacked the novel for its themes of adultery and its gentle mockery of bourgeois life, and in 1857 Flaubert was prosecuted for 'offense against public and religious morality and good morals'.

Flaubert was acquitted, arguing that the book did not seek to justify Emma's licentiousness. Ironically, far from limiting the novel’s readership, the prosecution, and the controversy surrounding it, helped Madame Bovary achieve widespread notoriety and acclaim. The incident would be echoed seventy years later in the Lady Chatterley trial, which saw the publishing house Penguin being prosecuted for releasing an unabridged edition of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which, it was argued, contained obscene and illicit material. Penguin won the case, even though Lawrence's novel was more explicit than Flaubert's, showing how standards had changed in the intervening years - largely due to the influence of Flaubert's masterpiece.

The novel begins from the perspective of Charles Bovary, entering a classroom in his school. Following the Bildungsroman structure common in European literature at the time, the story begins by tracing Charles' adolescence and his emergence as a doctor. It is on a visit to one of his patients that he first encounters Emma, whom he goes on to marry.

The perspective shifts to Emma, who quickly starts to chafe against her new life as a housewife and mother in the rural town of Yonville-l'Abbaye. She begins to have affairs behind her husband's back, but her passions are wasted, as her lovers abandon her. Accruing debts and failing to stop the spread of the scandalous rumours that have developed in the wake of her affairs, Emma - and Charles - fall further and further into despair.

Reading novels in French is a great way to improve your vocabulary, as well as your understanding of French culture, history and society. For learners, we recommend simple or children’s stories, such as Le Petit Prince.

Madame Bovary, on the other hand, is not a children’s novel, and it isn’t at all simple. In fact the novel is revered for its stylistic prose and sumptuous, elaborate imagery, which showed readers how poetic and elastic the French language could be in the hands of a master storyteller. The novel's descriptions of Emma's lover Léon, for instance, with his 'grand œil bleu...plus limpide et plus beau que ces lacs des montagnes où le ciel se mire' ('great blue eye, clearer and more beautiful than those mountain lakes where the sky admires itself') are particularly sumptuous - and therefore quite difficult for learners to follow in the original French.

That said, being able to tackle Flaubert in French is a goal of many learners, and is certainly possible once you reach C2 level. If you wish to read the novel in English, Lydia Davis' 2010 translation is considered by many to be the most readable, while Adam Thorpe's 2011 translation aims for a greater sense of authenticity by only employing English words that were in use in the 1850s, when Flaubert was writing Madame Bovary.

There are fifteen full-feature films of Madame Bovary. The first, Unholy Love, is a 1932 loose adaptation of the book set in America. The most recent adaptation was the 2014 film starring Mia Wasikowska and Rhys Ifans, although Emma Bovary, 2021, is a French film which depicts the courtroom drama following the prosecution of Flaubert, interspersed with scenes from the plot of the book.

Gustave Flaubert was one of the most influential writers of the 19th century. He was born in 1821 in Rouen, where part of Madame Bovary is set. After giving up his studies in law, he published Madame Bovary, his debut novel, at the age of thirty-five, which secured his reputation. He went on to write a number of other works, including Salammbô (1862) and Sentimental Education (1869) championing his own brand of literary realism, in which he painstakingly searched for 'le mot juste' to describe his settings and characters with as much fidelity as possible.

He died in 1880 in Croisset, near his home town of Rouen, likely from a stroke. But he continued to exact a huge influence on the literary world, influencing subsequent writers such as Émile Zola, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and Julian Barnes.