Madame Bovary

Emma Bovary has read too many novels. That's her tragedy. Married to a dull country doctor in a provincial French town, she imagines herself the heroine of some sweeping romance, her heart perpetually elsewhere - with visiting aristocrats, with the smooth-talking clerk Léon, with anyone who might deliver her from the crushing banality of her daily life. She spends beyond her means, pursues affair after affair, and digs herself deeper into debt and despair. Flaubert watches it all with devastating precision, neither condemning nor condoning, simply rendering the textures of a life consumed by fantasy. Published in 1856, the novel caused an obscenity trial that made Flaubert famous before he was acquitted. What made the judges recoil was not salacity but sympathy - here was a novel that took a married woman's desires seriously, that showed how dreams can curdle into destruction. More than a century later, Emma Bovary remains the definitive portrait of wanting more than life can give.