Madame Bovary - Unabridged

"Madame Bovary" is the brilliant debut novel from Gustave Flaubert, considered the father of literary realism. First serialized and published in 1856, "Madame Bovary" is now considered one of the finest novels ever written. The plot concerns the life and romantic entanglements of its title character, Emma Bovary (née Rouault), a farm girl who marries a wealthy widower in the hopes of living out the life she has read about in her romantic novels. Finding married life stifling and boring, Emma begins embarking on affairs and her life swiftly descends into chaos, forcing Emma to make drastic and ultimately tragic decisions. Controversial and scandalous when it was first published, "Madame Bovary" is now considered one of the most important and influential novels in history. It is presented here in its original and unabridged format, as translated from the French by Eleanor Marx-Aveling.

Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist and a leading advocate of the "literary realism" genre of writing, which sought to portray life in stark, honest terms and to avoid grandiose and overblown prose. He was admired by and influenced countless authors, including Guy de Maupassant, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre and Emile Zola. His best known work - his debut novel "Madame Bovary"- is considered one of the finest novels ever written. A writer from an early age, Flaubert originally planned to embark on a legal career to pay the bills, but his health and his indifference to studying in Paris drove him away from the study of law. He published a short novella - "November" - in 1842, but destroyed his next work, a novel called "The Temptation of Saint Anthony," at the encouragement of some literary friends who deemed it too ostentatious. Taking these criticisms to heart, Flaubert began work on "Madame Bovary" and concentrated on making the work as believable and free from extravagance as possible. When it was finally published after five years of painstaking work, it was met with rapturous reviews and became a best-seller. This would become Flaubert's permanent writing style, laboring for years over his manuscripts, honing and refining his prose until he found what he called "le mot juste" (the "right word"). This insistence on perfectionism limited his output, but his realistic and painstaking style of writing drew many imitators and admirers.While he published four more novels and a collection of his correspondence, none of his later works matched the success of "Madame Bovary," but his writing style continues to inspire writers two centuries after his birth. Flaubert suffered from ill health for most of his life (including a number of venereal diseases) and he eventually died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1880 at the age of fifty-eight.