The Doctor's Wife: A Novel

In 1864, Mary Elizabeth Braddon turned her notorious talent for scandal toward something more ambitious: a deliberate conversation with Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The result is her most self-conscious work of literature, a sensation novel that borrows Flaubert's framework while rewriting its conclusions entirely. Isabel Gilbert is a woman of romantic imagination imprisoned in a marriage to a kind but spiritually pallid country doctor. Her husband is not cruel, he is merely incapable of comprehending her poetic soul, her longing for adventure, her desperate need to be seen. When passion finally arrives, it arrives with the full force of sensation fiction: adultery, social ruin, a public reckoning. But Braddon, unlike Flaubert, gives her heroine a different fate, one that scandalized and satisfied readers in equal measure, depending on where they stood in the battle between desire and duty. This is Victorian sensation fiction at its most literarily self-aware: a novel that knows exactly what it is doing and why. It offers the pleasures of scandal, jealousy, intrigue, female suffering played out for an audience, while simultaneously asking serious questions about the cost of imagination in a world that has no place for it.