13 h 5 minAudiobook10 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · 321 pagesHardcover · 6 × 9 in · 321 pagesAbout this book
What happens when the life you long for makes the life you have impossible to bear?
Emma Bovary expects the passion and luxury she finds in romances. Marriage to Charles, a kind but dull country doctor, offers something smaller: a quiet home in the French provinces. As ordinary days fall short of her dreams, Emma looks for escape in fine things and forbidden love, putting more than her own happiness at risk.
In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert sets Emma’s restless hopes against the narrow world of Yonville. Léon Dupuis shares her romantic tastes; Rodolphe Boulanger sees an easy conquest. Around them, shopkeepers and neighbours pursue comfort, money and status. With exact prose and sharp satire, Flaubert explores the distance between what people desire, what they say and how they live.
What you’ll discover
- A restless inner life Enter Emma’s longing for passion, and feel how deeply ordinary life disappoints her.
- Love without shared dreams Watch Charles offer sincere devotion while Emma waits for a feeling he cannot provide.
- A town laid bare Meet Yonville’s neighbours, whose talk of progress and respectability reveals an appetite for status.
- The price of longing Follow the pull of clothes, furnishings and credit as desire reaches into daily life.
- Prose that looks closely Discover how Flaubert’s precise details reveal the gap between romantic dreams and lived experience.
Who will love it
For readers who love close portraits of character, tragedy and clear, exact prose, and for anyone curious about how romantic dreams, money and respectability shape a life.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A doctor's awkward start in life
- A farm girl with borrowed dreams
- Marriage proves smaller than the dream
- Yonville and its small world
- Desire finds a way out
- Debts, lies and a doomed hope
- What the novel is really about
- A style built on cold, exact looking
- Why the book caused a trial
Who’s who
- Emma BovaryA farm girl educated in a convent, she craves the passion and luxury of the romances she loves, and is bored by her provincial life.
- Charles BovaryA modest country doctor, devoted and slow, who loves Emma sincerely and wants only a quiet, comfortable home.
- Rodolphe BoulangerA wealthy, self-assured landowner and practiced seducer who sees Emma as an easy conquest.
- Léon DupuisA young law clerk with a taste for poetry and music, who shares Emma's romantic leanings.
- Monsieur HomaisYonville's pharmacist, a talkative champion of science and progress, eager for status and public praise.
- Monsieur LheureuxA smooth draper and moneylender who sells Emma goods on credit and profits from her appetite for fine things.
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- 15-minute summary
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- Paperback
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- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert · 1856
Emma marries a country doctor, but her dreams of passion and luxury put her provincial life at risk.
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1 of 9
A doctor's awkward start in life
The novel opens not with Emma but with Charles Bovary, as a shy new boy in a school classroom. He arrives wearing a ridiculous cap, and his classmates laugh at him. From the first pages, Flaubert shows a young man who is slow, eager to please and easily led.
Charles grows up under the pressure of an ambitious mother and a rough father. He is pushed into medical studies, struggles through them, and becomes only a health officer, a lesser kind of doctor. His mother arranges a first marriage for him with an older widow who is jealous and controlling. He settles into a modest practice in a village called Tostes.
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What is Madame Bovary about?
It follows Emma Bovary, a country doctor's wife who longs for the passion and luxury she has read about in romances. Her attempts to escape boredom lead to affairs, spending and debt in a small Norman town.
Why was Madame Bovary put on trial?
In 1857 the French government charged Flaubert with offending public and religious morals, claiming the novel made adultery look attractive. He was acquitted, and the trial made the book better known.
What is bovarysme?
It is a term taken from the heroine's name. It describes a habit of imagining oneself as someone grander or more romantic than one is, and being unhappy with real life as a result.
The author
Gustave Flaubert
1821–1880 · French novelist
Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist born in Rouen in 1821. He lived much of his adult life at Croisset, near Rouen. He published Madame Bovary in 1857, Salammbô in 1862, Sentimental Education in 1869, and Three Tales in 1877. He died at Croisset in 1880.
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