From the back cover:

 

“She is a very ordinary middle-class woman, with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is remarkable only for an unusual deficiency of natural feeling.” Thus Mary McCarthy, in her memorable Foreword Signet Classic edition, describes Emma Bovary, whose ill-starred pursuit of tawdry romantic dreams shapes Flaubert’s great novel. Set amid the stifling atmosphere of nineteenth-century bourgeois France, Madame Bovary is at once an unsparing depiction of a woman’s gradual corruption and a savagely ironic study of human shallowness and stupidity. Neither Emma, nor her lovers, nor Homais, the “man of science,” escapes the author’ Read More »