Recommendations
Books Like Madame Bovary
What to read after Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) invented modern fiction — the free indirect style, the morally neutral narrator, the use of physical detail to carry psychological weight. Emma Bovary's destruction by the gap between her romantic imagination and the provincial reality of her life has never been more perfectly rendered. If you were drawn to its precision and its sympathy for an impossible desire, these novels will find you in the same territory.
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The Russian companion to Madame Bovary — a married woman who pursues a passionate love affair and is destroyed by the social consequences; Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are often called the two great nineteenth-century novels about adultery, and comparing them shows what Tolstoy added to the Flaubert tradition: the social panorama, the moral argument through Levin, the refusal of the cool ironist's distance
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
Isabel Archer, an American in Europe who makes a catastrophic marriage — Henry James is the major novelist who was most deeply influenced by Flaubert, and The Portrait of a Lady is his attempt to do what Madame Bovary does: follow an intelligent, idealistic woman from her freedom into the cage society has prepared for her; the free indirect style that James mastered came directly from Flaubert
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Edna Pontellier in 1890s New Orleans, awakening to her own desire and the impossibility of fulfilling it within the constraints of her marriage and society — the American Madame Bovary; shorter and more compressed than Flaubert's novel, published in 1899 and immediately suppressed, it asks the same questions about what a woman who wants something other than what her world offers is supposed to do
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Dorothea Brooke's idealism in the English midlands — the Victorian companion to Madame Bovary; where Flaubert treats Emma's romanticism with cool irony, Eliot treats Dorothea's idealism with genuine sympathy; reading both novels together shows the range of what the nineteenth-century novel could do with the figure of the intelligent woman in a world designed to confine her
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A Sentimental Education
by Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert's second major novel — Frédéric Moreau's long, unsuccessful passion for Madame Arnoux, set against the 1848 Revolution; longer and more panoramic than Madame Bovary, it extends Flaubert's project from a woman's romantic self-destruction to a man's political and romantic disillusionment; many critics consider it his greatest achievement
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Effi Briest
by Theodor Fontane
A young Prussian woman who has a brief affair and is destroyed by the social consequences, decades later — the German Madame Bovary; Fontane published Effi Briest in 1896 and acknowledged Flaubert's influence; the two novels make a fascinating comparison: the same social logic, the same narrative coolness, the same sympathy for the woman the social order destroys, in two very different national traditions
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart in Gilded Age New York, too knowing to pretend and too poor to survive without pretending — Wharton is the American Flaubert; The House of Mirth applies the same cool precision to the social destruction of a woman who cannot fit into the system that claims to support her; the most relevant American novel to readers of Madame Bovary
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Cousin Bette
by Honoré de Balzac
Bette Fischer's decades-long campaign of revenge against the Hulot family — Balzac is the novelist Flaubert was explicitly reacting against when he wrote Madame Bovary; where Balzac is panoramic, energetic, and moralistic, Flaubert is concentrated, precise, and neutral; reading Cousin Bette after Madame Bovary shows why Flaubert's revolution was necessary
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