Reading Order
Madame Bovary Reading Order
Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) is a standalone novel — there is no series and no sequel. Emma Bovary, a farmer's daughter who has married a provincial doctor, finds her romantic fantasies irreconcilable with the reality of her life and pursues affairs and extravagances that destroy her. One of the founding texts of literary realism and of the modern novel, it was prosecuted for obscenity on publication and has been in print ever since.
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Madame Bovary
Complete Madame Bovary Book List
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Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert·1857·The novel itself — approximately 350 pages; the translation by Lydia Davis (Viking, 2010) is now considered the standard English edition; also widely recommended: Geoffrey Wall (Penguin, 1992) and Francis Steegmuller (Random House, 1957); published serially in the Revue de Paris in 1856, prosecuted for obscenity alongside Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, and acquitted - Buy
A Sentimental Education
OptionalGustave Flaubert·1869·Flaubert's second major novel — Frédéric Moreau's long, unsuccessful passion for Madame Arnoux, set against the backdrop of the 1848 Revolution in Paris; longer and slower than Madame Bovary but considered by many critics his greatest achievement - Buy
Three Tales
OptionalGustave Flaubert·1877·Flaubert's final published work — three stories in very different registers: 'A Simple Heart,' 'The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier,' and 'Herodias'; the best entry point to his short fiction and a natural companion to Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Madame Bovary about?
Emma Bovary is a farmer's daughter who has educated herself on romantic novels and grown up expecting a life of passion, luxury, and beauty. She marries Charles Bovary, a well-meaning but dull provincial doctor, and discovers that marriage and provincial life are nothing like she had imagined. She takes lovers, accumulates debts in pursuit of elegance she cannot afford, and is destroyed — financially and then physically — by the gap between her imagination and the world. Flaubert called the novel a study of 'the vulgarity of the bourgeoisie,' but the novel's sympathy for Emma's predicament is more complex than that description suggests.
Was Flaubert really on trial for Madame Bovary?
Yes — Flaubert and his publisher were prosecuted by the Imperial government of Napoleon III in January 1857 for 'outrage to public morals and religion.' The charges related to the novel's frank treatment of adultery and its apparent failure to punish the adulterous characters morally. Flaubert and his publisher were acquitted, but the trial made the novel famous and ensured its commercial success. The irony is that Madame Bovary is, if anything, profoundly moral in its treatment of Emma's self-deception and the consequences of her choices — it is simply not moralistic in the way the prosecution expected.
Is Madame Bovary a feminist novel?
Debates about the novel's feminism have continued since its publication. Some readers argue that Emma is a victim of the bourgeois romantic ideology that educated women to have desires they could not fulfill within the social roles available to them — and that Flaubert's sympathy for her amounts to an implicit feminist critique. Others argue that Flaubert presents Emma's desires themselves as the problem — that the novel is a satire of romantic self-delusion rather than an argument about social constraint. The two readings are not entirely incompatible. Flaubert famously said 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi' — but what he meant by this is itself debated.
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