"Down in her soul she was waiting for something to happen. Like a shipwrecked sailor, she perused her solitary world with hopeless eyes, searching for some white sail..."

The realities of married life fall a long way short of Emma Bovary's expectations. Her romantic hopes have been dashed on the rocks of a stultifying life bound to a dull, mediocre, provincial doctor. The novels she read merely feed her dissatisfaction. Material possessions offer scant recompense. Motherhood disappoints. To fill the yawning void Emma succumbs to reckless extramarital affairs. But pursuing a fantasy brings only one certainty: that the mounting debts funding her dream will one day fall due for repayment. Hopes and ideals are crushed by bitter experience in Flaubert's unflinching tragedy of domestic life, which scandalised polite society and became the subject of a cause célèbre when it was published in 1857.
--back cover