Madame Bovary is a novel by Gustave Flaubert, often considered his masterpiece. Emma Bovary yearns for a life of luxury and passion of the kind she reads about in romantic novels. But life with her country doctor husband Charles Bovary in the provinces is unutterably boring, and she embarks on love affairs to realize her fantasies. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and when real life continues to fail to live up to her romantic expectations, the consequences are devastating... Flauberts novel scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857, and it remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society. Flauberts legendary style, his intense care over the selection of words and the shaping of sentences, his unmatched ability to convey a mental world through the careful selection of telling details, shine on every page of this marvelous work.