Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert — one title in the rankings.

Editor’s note French novelist who worked for years on single sentences in search of the exact word, and whose Madame Bovary (1857) helped define the realist novel. Emma, a country doctor’s wife in Normandy raised on romantic novels, is bored by her kind, dull husband and looks for the life she has read about in affairs and luxuries she cannot pay for, until the debts close in. Flaubert was tried for offending public morals when it was serialised, and acquitted. Precise and merciless; many readers admire it more than they enjoy it, which shows in a modest score.

Ranked titles

1 book

Average score

7.3

Total ratings

543

First published

1857

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