GajimaruClassics.
Madame BovaryMadame Bovary
A provincial doctor’s wife, suffocated by boredom and fed on romance novels, chases passion and luxury toward ruin. Flaubert’s pursuit of the perfect sentence put the book on trial for immorality.
Character notes and context for the chapter you’ve read.
The novel that taught fiction to be precise, every sentence weighed to perfection, and a devastatingly clear-eyed portrait of a life dreamed too large for its circumstances.
SettingProvincial France, 1840s
Stifling provincial France under a smug new middle class, where a married woman’s horizons ended at the parlour wall and romance novels were the only escape on offer.
On screen & beyond
- Vincente Minnelli’s film (1949)
- Claude Chabrol’s French film (1991)