Madame Bovary / Flaubert, Gustave

The wife of a provincial doctor seeks to escape her boredom by indulging in romantic fantasies and adulterous affairs in nineteenth-century France.

A nineteenth-century French woman pursues her romantic dreams through a series of lovers.

"Flaubert's tragic novel stands as a brilliant portrayal of infidelity, an incisive psychological portrait of a woman town between duty and desire. Written with acute attention to telling detail, Madame Bovary exposes the emptiness of one woman's bourgeois existence and her failure to fill that void with fantasies, sex, and material objects. Emma's thirst for life mirrors the universal human impulse for idealized fulfillment."--back cover.

Presents Gustave Flaubert's 1857 novel about a young woman of the bourgeois class whose unhappiness in her marriage leads her to several affairs and a tragic fate. Includes a scholarly introduction and documents from the trial in which Flaubert was accused of offending public morality.