Madame Bovary is a novel by French author Gustave Flaubert and one of the masterpieces of French literature. The 1856 novel introduced an unrelenting realism into Western literature, making it a landmark in the history of fiction.
The title character of the novel is Emma Bovary, a middle-class woman married to a kindly but dull village doctor in Normandy. Emma is bored with her life, and her dissatisfaction leads to a love affair that turns out badly. She deludes herself with romantic longings, piles up large debts, and finally takes her own life in despair. The subject matter created a scandal, and Flaubert was tried and nearly convicted on a charge of immorality in 1857.
Flaubert tells his tragic story of French provincial life through an accumulation of details. Emma Bovary is a woman of only average intelligence whose romantic fantasies lead to disaster. Although the story is a commonplace tale of adultery, the book remains a masterpiece because of its deep insights into its heroine, its objectivity, and the precision of its realistic style.
Flaubert was a slow, deliberate writer who took five years to complete Madame Bovary. He first published the novel in installments in the French magazine La Revue de Paris in 1856. It was then published in two volumes in 1857. The novel’s subtitle was Provincial Customs.
