Madame Bovary June 2014 | Gustave Flaubert

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in a 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, voracious spending and eventually, adultery.

Madame Bovary is the story of a beautiful young woman who marries a luckless country doctor. She tries to escape the narrow confines of her life through a series of passionate affairs, hoping to find in other men the romantic ideal she always dreamed about. Flaubert's daring description of adultery and sinfulness caused a national scandal when it was first published, and this masterpiece of realist literature has lost none of its impact today. Translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling.