Madame retailer Bovary by Gustave Flaubert - Franklin Library - 1978

Madame Bovary, originally published as Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners is the debut novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert, published in 1856. The eponymous character lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.

Gustave Flaubert(1821 - 1880) he has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. Long established as one of the greatest novels, Madame Bovary has been described as a "perfect" work of fiction. Henry James wrote: "Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone: it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment."

Marcel Proust praised the "grammatical purity" of Flaubert's style, while Vladimir Nabokov said that "stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do".

The novel exemplifies the tendency of realism, over the course of the nineteenth century, to become increasingly psychological, concerned with retailer the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than of external things. As such it prefigures the work of the great modernist novelists Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

This book is in mint condition - never cracked.

Quarter bound in genuine leather with hubbed spine, 22kt gold accents inlaid on cloth-covered covers with decorative paper endsheets and a silk page marker.