Introduction

Emma, a farmer's daughter, read a great many romantic novels at her convent school and dreams of the passionate love and the luxurious, elegant life she finds in them. She marries Charles Bovary, a dull, honest country doctor devoted to her, but soon grows weary of the stifling life of the small town and her tedious husband. A ball at a marquis's château shows her the glamour of high society and leaves her more dissatisfied than ever. She takes as lovers first the rakish landowner Rodolphe and then the young clerk Léon, and to sustain the life of her fantasies runs up enormous debts behind her husband's back with the scheming merchant Lheureux. When the creditors close in and her lovers abandon her one by one, she poisons herself with arsenic. Flaubert wrote the novel in a cool, objective style exact to the last detail; he is said to have remarked, 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.' It is acknowledged as the beginning of the modern novel.