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Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in a marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, voracious spending and eventually, adultery.

As a provocative tale of passion and complacency, ideals and self-delusions, Madame Bovary (1857) remains a milestone in European fiction. In telling his story of Emma Bovary a farmer s daughter who, with girlhood dreams fuelled by sensational novels, marries a provincial doctor Flaubert inaugurated a literary mode that would be called Realism. But so exacting were Flaubert s standards of authenticity that his portrayal of the breakdown of Emma s marriage, and the frankness with which he treats her adulterous liaisons, scandalized many of his contemporaries. Yet to others, the mix of painful introspection, emotional blindness, and cynical self-seeking that distinguishes his characters made the novel instantly recognizable as a work of genius. It is a novel fixed upon the idea of romance of the need for Romance in the face of day-to-day banalities. It is a theme that is ironic insofar as the exquisite clarity of Flaubert s prose serves to hauntingly underline the futility of the heroine s ultimate tragedy.

The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.