"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 to this 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 and 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 sciend," escapes the author's searing castigation: and it is the book's final profound irony that only Charles, Emma's oxlike, eternally deceived husband, emerges with a measure of human grace through his stubborn and selfless love. With its rare formal perfection, Madame Bovary represents, as Frank O'Connor has declared, "possibly the most beautifully written book ever composed; undoubtedly the most beautifully written novel...a gook that invites superlatives...the most important novel of the century."
(back cover)