Madame Bovary

"This life of hers was as cold as an attic that looks north," Gustave Flaubert wrote of his protagonist, "and boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart." Madame Bovary longs for romantic excitement, and the tedium of her provincial existence drives her to deceit and despair.

Flaubert's frank, nonjudgmental treatment of adultery scandalized Madame Bovary's first readers but his realistic satire of middle-class values forever changed the way novels were written.

Graced by 10 full-page line illustrations by one of the noted precursors of the Pop Art movement, this handsome hardcover edition presents the original English translation by Eleanor Marx Aveling, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx.