At convent school, a girl acquires romantic notions of a lover who will live for her alone. She marries a kind but dull country doctor and discovers that "This life of hers was as cold as an attic that looks north; and boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart." Emma Bovary`s quest for escape from the emptiness of her bourgeois existence leads to infidelity and financial extravagance, and Gustave Flaubert`s powerful and deeply moving examination of her moral degeneration is universally regarded as a landmark of nineteenth century fiction.

Flaubert was brought to trial by the French government on the grounds of this novel`s alleged immorality but narrowly escaped conviction. Madame Bovary remains a touchstone for literar discussions of provincial life and adultery as well as a summit of prose art, a pioneering work of realism that forever changed the way novels are written.