A provincial doctor's romantic wife pursues adulterous affairs and luxurious fantasies to escape bourgeois boredom, ruining herself with debt and despair.
Books mentioned in Madame Bovary (4)
Paul and Virginia by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: “She had read "Paul and Virginia," and she had dreamed of the little bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fidele, but above all of the sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird's nest.”
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo: “She declared she adored children; this was her consolation, her joy, her passion, and she accompanied her caresses with lyrical outburst which would have reminded anyone but the Yonville people of Sachette in "Notre Dame de Paris."”
La Tour de Nesle by Alexandre Dumas: “the coarse colours of four bills representing four scenes from the “Tour de Nesle,” with a motto in Spanish and French at the bottom.”
La Guerre des Dieux by Evariste de Parny: “This mockery of the first of the sacraments made the Abbe Bournisien angry; old Bovary replied by a quotation from "La Guerre des Dieux"; the cure wanted to leave; the ladies implored, Homais interfered; and they succeeded in making the priest sit down again, and he quietly went on with the…”
Books that mention Madame Bovary (30)
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky: “He observed an open book on the table, Madam Bovary, and requested the leave of the lady of the house to take it with him.”
The Island Pharisees by John Galsworthy: “'Madame Bovary!' he said quizzically, reading the title of the book on the little fat man's bookrest”
The Trail of the Hawk by Sinclair Lewis: “and _War and Peace_, and _Madame Bovary_, and some Turgenev”
Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes: “Juliet Herbert's translation of Madame Bovary, which the novelist oversaw, and which he proclaimed 'a masterpiece'.”
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah: “She had her favorite copy of Madame Bovary and the book everyone was reading—Autant en emporte le vent—and some clothes; no food or water.”
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco: “I who keep searching for my own Madame Bovary so we can have a big scene”
Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger: “"Madame Bovary at Columbia Extension School... Madame Bovary takes a course in Television Appreciation." (Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes)”
Babel Tower by A. S. Byatt: “On Frederica's teaching reading list: 'Madame Bovary, The Idiot, Middlemarch, The Castle, Anna Karenina...'”
The White Album by Joan Didion: “Madame Bovary told us more about bourgeois life than several generations of Marxists have, but there does not seem much doubt that Flaubert saw it as an artistic problem.”
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine: “If you think Madame Bovary commits adultery because she's trying to escape the banality...”
How to Be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis: “She’s not tormented like the old adulteresses of fiction – and when Goodlove leaves, she doesn’t throw herself under a train like Anna Karenina or poison herself like Madame Bovary.”
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf: “what Flaubert went through when he wrote MADAME BOVARY; what Keats was going through when he tried to write poetry”
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom: “The influence of Cervantes is intense upon Stendhal and Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary is "the female Quixote."”
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie: “The Magic Mountain, Madame Bovary, Don Quixote.”
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante: “"And so I pushed on, in my speculations, from the first and second Biblical creations to Defoe-Flanders, Flaubert-Bovary, Tolstoy-Karenina..." — Elena's own narrative reflection on literary heroines.”
Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry: “Encouraged, I finally did buy a book, Madame Bovary”
Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk: “The famous French novel's immoral, unstable heroine Madame Bovary also committed suicide in the same manner”
On Literature by Umberto Eco: “cited alongside Little Red Riding-Hood and Ulysses as fictional individuals”
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose: “Madame Bovary begins from the perspective of a classmate of Emma Bovary's future husband, a narrator who is never heard from again.”
The Facts by Philip Roth: “had me obsessively thumbing through the pages of Madame Bovary during the years I was searching for the perch”
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk: “While Flaubert was writing Madame Bovary, inspired by his beloved Louise Collet... he kept in a drawer a lock of her hair, as well as a handkerchief and a slipper of hers”
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk: “an unforgettable hero like Tom Jones, Ivan Karamazov, Madame Bovary, Père Goriot, Anna Karenina”
The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino: Discussed as a work in which Flaubert excludes the language and visions of his other novels
A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk: “In Madame Bovary, Emma Bovary sends her baby daughter to live with a wet-nurse”
Artful by Ali Smith: “One of the most recent translators of Madame Bovary, Lydia Davis, notes”
Whistler by Ann Patchett: “I read Madame Bovary because of you”
Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham: “Hayward talked of Richard Feverel and Madame Bovary, of Verlaine, Dante, and Matthew Arnold.”
Light, Wind and Dreams by Atsushi Nakajima: “Madame Bovary is without doubt a masterpiece. And Oliver Twist, what a childish domestic novel! Yet I think Dickens, who left stories for children, may be more of an adult than Flaubert, who wrote the novel for adults. [auto-translated]”
Cogwheels by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: “Even when I picked up Madame Bovary, which I had read over and over, I felt that I was, after all, nothing but a middle-class Monsieur Bovary myself. [auto-translated]”