Recommendations
Books Like Madame Bovary
Best books to read after Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary is the founding text of modern literary realism — a formally perfect novel about Emma Bovary's romantic self-delusion and its devastating consequences. These recommendations extend the experience through Flaubert's other works and through literary fiction that inherits his stylistic innovations.
- 1Buy
Sentimental Education
by Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert's 1869 novel about Frédéric Moreau's Parisian failure is the companion to Madame Bovary — where Emma romanticizes romantic passion, Frédéric romanticizes artistic and political ambition, and both are destroyed by the gap between imagination and reality. Often considered equally great and less read.
- 2Buy
The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
The predecessor to Madame Bovary in the French psychological realist tradition — Julien Sorel's self-fashioning ambition is the male, active counterpart to Emma Bovary's passive romantic fantasy. Stendhal is Flaubert's most important precursor, and the contrast between them defines the range of French psychological realism.
- 3Buy
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's Anna is the Russian counterpart to Emma Bovary — a woman who follows her passions outside the socially permitted limits and is destroyed by the collision. The comparison between Flaubert's ironic, precise portrait of Emma and Tolstoy's compassionate, panoramic portrait of Anna is one of the great exercises in comparative literature.
- 4Buy
The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Edna Pontellier's awakening to desires that her society cannot accommodate is the American counterpart to Emma Bovary's romantic delusions — both women are destroyed by what they want and what the world will not give them. Chopin is more sympathetic to her protagonist than Flaubert is to his.
- 5Buy
The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
Isabel Archer's insistence on determining her own destiny and her catastrophic marriage to Gilbert Osmond is the American novel's answer to Emma Bovary — both novels are about a woman's self-conception being tested and destroyed by reality. James's style is the Anglophone equivalent of Flaubert's precision.
- 6Buy
Effi Briest
by Theodor Fontane
Fontane's 1894 German novel about a young woman married off to an older man and who takes a lover — the German counterpart to Madame Bovary, equally restrained and precise, equally devastating in its portrait of what society does to women who transgress its sexual rules.
- 7Buy
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart's destruction by New York society — her inability to sell herself cheaply enough to survive in a world that commodifies women — is the American Gilded Age version of Emma Bovary's story: a woman of taste and intelligence destroyed by the gap between what she wants and what the world will let her have.
- 8Buy
Madame Bovary
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Vargas Llosa's 1975 critical study of Madame Bovary, 'The Perpetual Orgy,' is one of the finest books ever written about a single novel — part memoir, part criticism, part love letter — and reading it alongside the novel transforms the reading experience by making Flaubert's technical choices visible.
More Madame Bovary Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.