Emma is the beautiful daughter of a farmer in provincial northern France where she receives a good convent education but is secretly inspired by passionate novels of d’amour and extravagance. When she meets Dr Bovary, a kindly yet doltish man of little remark and less career ambition, she is seduced by the belief that romantic fervour has finally arrived. She marries him, only to become disillusioned and bitter when her marriage to a dispassionate man, and the boredom and banality of provincial life, does not meet the ideal she has waited for.

Unbeknownst to her husband she embarks on two affairs; one to a man who seeks only to add her to his list of conquests, and another to a man who adores her but cannot sustain her immoderate indulgence and delusions of grandeur. Feeling short-changed by life, she seeks to overcompensate with expensive trinkets, dinners and hotels, and ensnared in a series of ill-advised borrowings and repayments she leads her family into crushing debt and bankruptcy.

Madame Bovary was Gustave Flaubert’s first published novel in 1856 and is acknowledged as his finest, still topping the ‘Best Ever’ lists today. Predictably it was criticised for the immoral depiction of an adulterous woman, but the ensuing trial only increased the book’s notoriety, becoming a bestseller following the acquittal in 1857. Flaubert was a perfectionist about his writing and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste (“the right word”) and Madame Bovary was duly acclaimed for its realism; the meticulous portrait of provincial life and the countryside, the townspeople, and of the heroine herself – ‘the patron saint of wayward wives’. In fact Flaubert’s portrayal of Emma was considered so authentic that many women claimed to have been the model for the character, but Flaubert maintained, ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’

Of the nineteen previous translations, surprisingly none have stayed fixated with Flaubert’s fastidious phrasing, and by Davis’s own admission variety depends ‘on two factors: how a translator handles expressive English, and how liberally or narrowly each defines the task of the translator.’ Lydia Davis’s book is a more modern translation of Flaubert’s classic and seeks to update the out-moded speak that would not appeal to today’s audience, whilst holding true to Flaubert’s flawless description of Emma’s complex psychology. There is also a helpful notes section to illuminate any cultural or historical references that have remained. The simple storyline was never inaccessible by any reader, but the more modern tone of this translation brings the world of 19th century France to life again for readers in the 21st.

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