Madame Bovary A Penguin Classics Hardcover — Gustave Flaubert

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life An ardent reader of sentimental novels she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance in voracious spending and eventually in adultery But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating Flaubert s erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857 It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine but Flaubert insisted Madame Bovary c est moi