Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert · translated by Eleanor Marx Aveling

Reading time: about 8.5 h
Length: 115,779 words · 284 pages in print
Structure: 35 chapters · 1 front-matter section
Language: English (translated from French)
Era: Victorian

Emma Rouault marries a dull country doctor and finds that marriage, motherhood and provincial Normandy are nothing like the novels she read at the convent. Gustave Flaubert published the book in 1857, after its serialisation had been prosecuted for offending public morals and acquitted; it is the founding novel of modern realism.

Nothing in it is stated by the author. Flaubert removed himself from the sentences and left the reader alone with the objects — the wedding cake, the plaster curé in the garden, the blind beggar on the Rouen road — and let them carry the judgement. He worked at it for five years, and the result made a method available to everyone who came after.

This edition uses the English translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling (1886), the first into English; the three parts are given complete.

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About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer and held to human review; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

Part of The French Novel.

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