Madame Bovary

Author(s): Gustave Flaubert; Adam Thorpe (Translator)

Classics

Madame BovaryBy Gustave FlaubertEmma, the main heroine of the novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, is bored with the emptiness and ordinariness of the provincial life, so she engages in the extramarital affair hoping to change the circumstances. After the book had been published, the author and two editors were accused of the moral abuse and brought to trial. But the trial ended in acquittal, and the scandalous reputation made the novel widely popular. The true value of the work by Gustave Flaubert is in its details and manner of a plot delivery.

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Over 150 years since its first publication the power of Madame Bovary remains undiminished.Stunningly translated by Adam Thorpe, this edition brings us closer to Flaubert's original.

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a distinguished surgeon and a doctor's daughter. After three unhappy years of studying law in Paris, an epileptic attack ushered him into a life of writing. Madame Bovary won instant acclaim upon book publication in 1857, but Flaubert's frank display of adultery in bourgeois France saw him go on trial for immorality, only narrowly escaping conviction. Both Salammbo (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) were poorly received, and Flaubert's genius was not publicly recognized until Three Tales (1877). His reputation among his fellow writers, however, was more constant and those who admired him included Turgenev, George Sand, Victor Hugo and Zola. Flaubert's obsession with his art is legendary: he would work for days on a single page, obsessively attuning sentences, seeking always le mot juste in a quest for both beauty and precise observation. His style moved Edmund Wilson to say,'Flaubert, by a single phrase - a notation of some commonplace object - can convey all the poignance of human desire, the pathos of human defeat; his description of some homely scene will close with a dying fall that reminds one of great verse or music.' Flaubert died suddenly in May 1880, leaving his last work, Bouvard and Pecuchet, unfinished. Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, was published in 1992, and he has written nine others - most recently Hodd - two collections of stories and five books of poetry. He lives in France with his wife and family.

General Fields

  • : 9780099573074
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : Arrow
  • : 0.276
  • : October 2012
  • : 198mm X 129mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : February 2015
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Gustave Flaubert; Adam Thorpe (Translator)
  • : Paperback
  • : 1
  • : English
  • : 843/.8
  • : 384
  • : FC