Madame Bovary

Published in 1857, this novel follows Emma, a convent-educated woman married to Charles Bovary, a kindly, limited country doctor in Normandy. Bored by Yonville and by a husband who cannot match the feeling she has learned from novels, she seeks intensity in two affairs and in spending that the household cannot bear. The narrative stays close to provincial rooms, agricultural shows, and the slow machinery of debt, while Flaubert's third-person method records both Emma's longing and the banal world that will not answer it. The book is a study of marriage, appetite, and money in a small French town.

Bound in lilac cloth blocked with a design in silver and black. White dust-jacket printed in black and green.