Gustave Flaubert 
Madame Bovary 

In Madame Bovary, Charles, an awkward country doctor courts and weds Emma, the beautiful young daughter of a patient. Emma, unsuited to the role of housewife, quickly gets restless and begins to explore her passions. This leads to infidelities which she hides from Charles and, eventually, mounting debts as she turns to merchandise for her happiness. Flaubert’s novel is cited as the first example of literary realism and has been called a perfect work of fiction. Milan Kundera and Vladimir Nabokov have both described Madame Bovary as poetry in the form of prose.

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Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was a French novelist known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857). Born in Rouen to a middle-class family, he abandoned a law career in 1846 to write full-time. A scrupulous stylist, his total literary output was relatively small, and he was known for his painstaking labor. A proponent of le mot juste (the right word), he is considered the leading French exponent of literary realism and widely admired for his impeccable prose. Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera have placed Madame Bovary on the same artistic plane as poetry.