'Would this misery go on forever? Was there no escape? And yet she was every bit as good as all those other women who led happy lives!'


When Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is a dull country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns. In her quest to realize her dreams she takes a lover, and begins a devastating spiral into deceit and despair.

Flaubert's novel scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857, and it remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society. In this new translation Margaret Mauldon perfectly captures the tone that makes Flaubert's style so distinct and admired.
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Gustave Flaubert

Margaret Mauldon has worked as a translator since 1987. For OWC she has translated Zola's L'Assommoir, Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, Huysmans' Against Nature (winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation, 1999), Constant's Adolphe, and Maupassant's Bel-Ami. Malcolm Bowie was previously Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of All Souls College before he became Master of Christ's College, Cambridge in 2002. He is the author of books on Mallarmé, Freud and Proust, and his acclaimed study Proust Among the Stars (1998) won the $50,000 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2001, the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language.

`A superb new translation... If you've never read Madame Bovary, or if you've only worked through it in first-year college French, you need to sit down with this book as soon as possible. This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life.' Washington Post d