Review: Despite the absolute mess she made of her life one couldn't help but be charmed by Emma Bovary. A woman unable to find happiness in the simplicity of her life who rather than focus on the positives of her situation falls into the fantasies of romantic novels and thus destroys herself.
For a novel written in the mid-nineteenth century it was fascinating how easily this story could be transferred to the twenty-first century; a time when so many people are unable to feel satisfied with their comfortable lives because they are glued to their screens watching the fake glamour of others via social media.
It is often said that what makes a novel a classic is its ability to transcend time and space and speak to universal human conditions. If that is true then Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary fits the model perfectly as the story of Emma is one which could be understood by all generations.
Title: Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners
Author: Gustave Flaubert
Genre: Literary Realism
ISBN: 978-0141394671
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Publication Date: 12 April 1857
Publisher Description: 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 devastating consequences. 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." One of the greatest novels of the 19th century, Flaubert's torrid debut lives on in Geoffrey Wall's brilliant translation. This edition features an introduction by Wall, and a preface on Emma Bovary's femininity and modernity by novelist Michèle Roberts.