# Madame Bovary

**Author:** Gustave Flaubert
**Tags:** Domestic fiction, Married women, France, Adultery, Middle class, Suicide victims, Physicians' spouses
**Price:** Free
**Formats:** DOCX, EPUB, FB2, PDF, TXT
**Downloads:** 41
**Added:** 10.07.2026
**URL:** https://samolit.com/books/95889

## Description

In provincial Normandy, a young woman named Emma marries Charles Bovary, a well-meaning but unremarkable country doctor, believing marriage will deliver the passion and romance she has absorbed from novels. Instead she finds only tedium, and her restless imagination drives her toward reckless affairs, extravagant purchases, and an ever-widening gap between fantasy and reality. As debts mount and her illusions collapse one by one, the consequences of her pursuit of an idealized existence become impossible to escape. Gustave Flaubert's landmark 1857 novel offers a devastatingly precise portrait of a woman suffocated by bourgeois convention and her own longing for something more, rendered through prose so exact it scandalized readers and prosecutors alike upon publication. Blending irony, compassion, and unflinching psychological detail, the book dissects marriage, class aspiration, and the seductive dangers of romantic fantasy in small-town French society. A foundational work of literary realism, it remains a penetrating study of desire, disillusionment, and the tragic distance between the life one imagines and the life one is given.