~ Trade Paperback
Set amid the stifling atmosphere of 19th-century bourgeois France, Madame Bovary is at once an unsparing depiction of a woman’s gradual corruption and a savagely ironic study of human shallowness and stupidity.
Flaubert's novel scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857, being embraced by bourgeois women who claimed it spoke to the frustrations of their lives, and it remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society today.