Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics)

The notorious and celebrated novel that established modern realism
 
For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succès de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and scintillating novel.

This Penguin Classics edition is translated with notes and an introduction by Geoffrey Wall. It includes a preface by Michele Roberts. 

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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Published Dec 31, 2002

335 pages

Average rating: 7.32

93 RATINGS

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Community Reviews

teakenyon
Sep 24, 2025
9/10 stars
I didn't think much of the book after, but then a day or two later it really struck me. I really like how Madame Bovary is not just a tragic figure, not one to pity. She can be sympathetic, so lost and impacted by the world around her. Seen and unseen. Madame Bovary, c'est moi!
Vi Del Toro
Jun 03, 2025
8/10 stars
The drama! Let this be a lesson to all you ladies who read too many romance novels, indulge in the latest fashion trends, live beyond their means, and don’t attend to their feminine duties- lest they befall the same fate! No but forreal, this holds up to modern trash dramas and I am lovin’ it
rikaka279
Jan 14, 2025
9/10 stars
Charles is husband material.
Bijan H.
Jul 04, 2024
9/10 stars
The book looks very simple, but it has a lot to say. it has a lot of symbols that at first you may not get it, but later you will understand. each of the characters other that being a human, resemble a trait or changes in our interaction with world. for example a blind beggar resembles ugly side of life and mirrors the psychological condition of Emma Bovary that exists but she did not like to see, or the seller that makes the Bovary family go on debt is very similar to the issue we all encounter in our modern life when we get a mortgage. The book is trying to inform us that some times the reality of the life is not what you read in books or what you hear in the news.
Anilatac
Apr 16, 2024
4/10 stars
Eh. Wild ride for sure. Like ms ma'am was veeery horny and unsatisfied in her marriage. She's so dramatic from start to the very finish, which like respect, but also ma'am chill

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