Madame Bovary is considered by many as the first major novel in the style of literary realism and one of the most influential. It tells the story of Emma Bovary, wife of a simple country doctor, who lives beyond her means and has adulterous affairs to escape her bored and banal provincial existence.  Emma is a pretty girl, a farmer’s daughter with a convent education and a yearning for romance and luxury inspired by popular novels. Not surprisingly, her affairs run from infatuation to disappointment, and her consolation is indulgence in luxury goods bought on credit from a wily merchant, who ultimately calls in his loan, with drastic consequences. While the story is quite simple, the artistry is in the acute depiction of the mundane details of common life, the customs of the rural French, and the hidden patterns that mature into destiny.  The realism of the style exposes Emma’s romantic fantasies as illusions that crumble in the implacable grip of real life; as such, the book can be seen as a turning point away from romanticism to the realism that takes shape in the latter 19^th century. Madame Bovary created a scandal when it was serialized in La Revue de Paris in the fall of 1856.  Flaubert was prosecuted for obscenity in January1857 and acquitted the following month. The resulting notoriety made the book a bestseller when it was published in April of that year.  It is regarded as one of the greatest of novels and often described as a “perfect” work of fiction.

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