Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre
doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of
sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high
romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her
affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating.
Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary
caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that
many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted:
'Madame Bovary, c'est moi'.