One of the most daring and liberating novels ever written Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to a provincial doctor, Charles Bovary, yet harbor dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, Emma takes drastic action with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter.Gustave Flaubert (1821–80). French novelist and man of letters who is now regarded as one of the great literary artists of the nineteenth century.Born in Rouen in 1821, Flaubert was the son of a highly successful provincial doctor. While training somewhat reluctantly to become a lawyer, he experienced the first of a number of nervous attacks that left him exhausted and forced him to abandon his studies. He returned to live at home where he was able to concentrate fully on his writing. Flaubert was so devoted to the perfection of his art that he renounced everything that interfered with his writing, including his love for Mme Louise Colet. After the tragic deaths of his father in late 1845 and his adored younger sister, Caroline, only a few weeks later, Flaubert found himself the head of the family. He lived with his mother and the infant daughter of Caroline in Rouen for most of his adult life, leaving only for excursions abroad. In 1849 Flaubert set off with his companion Maxime du Camp on an eighteen-month tour of the Near East and while there managed to spend a large proportion of his inheritance and catch syphilis. He returned to France in 1851 and began work on his first book, Madame Bovary, shortly before his thirtieth birthday. He wrote very slowly, often agonizing for hours over the rhythm of a sentence, and the book took him five years to complete. After its publication in 1857 both he and his editor were tried for offences against public morals but were acquitted. Later that year, Flaubert travelled to Tunisia where he collected material for his second and eminently different novel, Salammbó. In it he gives a free reign to his passion for the exotic, but like the majority of Flaubert's work it was not well received in his lifetime. His other work includes Sentimental Education (1869), The Temptation of Saint Antony (1874), The Candidate, a political play which proved a disastrous failure, and Three Tales. The last of these was the only real success in his lifetime but unfortunately came at a time when Flaubert's health, spirits and finances were at their lowest ebb. He died suddenly in 1880 leaving his great comic masterpiece, Bouvard and Pécuchet, unfinished. His reputation and fame grew steadily in the years after his death and were strengthened by the publication of his many volumes of correspondence.
