Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics)The notorious and celebrated novel that established modern realism For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succs de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and scintillating novel. This Penguin