A tale of boredom, still gripping after 161 years.

Emma turned in surprise. "Goodness, you startled me," she said. "Who are you?" She spoke in the same fine English translation as the paperback.

It's simply devastating, he thought. Then, realizing that it was he whom she had addressed, he said, "Excuse me. I'm Sidney Kugelmass. I'm from City College. A professor of humanities. C.C.N.Y.? Uptown. I-oh, boy!"

Emma Bovary smiled flirtatiously and said, "Would you like a drink? A glass of wine, perhaps?"

-Woody Allen, The Kugelmass Episode (1975)


Flaubert's masterpiece, Madame Bovary, was first published today in 1856. 

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.



Henry Bemis wrote of it,

The book was serialized in October-December 1865. In January the French government charged him with promoting indecency and put him on trial.  Bovary was, by the standards of the time, a highly provocative book, and Flaubert narrowly escaped conviction by arguing he was, in fact, upholding decency by throwing a searchlight on its opposite. The scandal did wonders for the book’s sales.

Dramatized on stage, screen and television, Madame Bovary has never gone out of print. 



Long established as one of the greatest novels, the book has been described as a "perfect" work of fiction. Henry James wrote: "Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone: it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment." Marcel Proust praised the "grammatical purity" of Flaubert's style, while Vladimir Nabokov said that "stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do". Similarly, in his preface to his novel The Joke, Milan Kundera wrote, "[N]ot until the work of Flaubert did prose lose the stigma of aesthetic inferiority. Ever since Madame Bovary, the art of the novel has been considered equal to the art of poetry."

A free English translation is here. A free audio version is here.