Found in a dusty corner of "The Green Shed:
Flaubert's infamous adulteress is sexed-up, 1950s style, on the cover of this paperback. Maybe it's her anachronistic makeup, or her backless nightwear (and seriously, how is she keeping that garment from falling off?) but this picture does not say "nineteenth century novel" to me. It doesn't even say "notorious nineteenth century novel" to me. I could imagine an ignorant reader mistaking this one for contemporary sleaze, and finding himself with something quite different!In 1857 when Madame Bovary was first published, the detailed realism of its love scenes shocked and horrified the entire populace of France; and Gustave Flaubert, its author, was made to stand trial for "immorality".Since then, the brilliant, cynical story of Emma Bovary, who revolts against her bourgeois surroundings and her marriage only to find profound disillusionment in the arms of a shallow lover, has come to be regarded as one the masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature.Flaubert's aim was to give an impersonal, objective account of emotions and events, without any of the moralizing which was then the literary fashion. His Madame Bovary stands today as the perfect model of fictional "realism".
