Let's read & discuss "Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners, commonly known as simply Madame Bovary, is the début novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert, originally published in 1856 and 1857.

The eponymous character, Emma Bovary, lives beyond her means in order to escape the ennui of provincial life.

When the novel was first serialised in Revue de Paris between 1 October and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. Following Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller in April 1857 when it was published in two volumes.

A seminal work of literary realism, the novel is now ranked among Flaubert's masterpieces, and one of the most influential literary works in history.

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