"One of the great creations of modern literature, Emma Bovary is the bored wife of a provincial doctor, whose desires and illusions are inevitably shattered when reality catches up with her. A woman with 'an insatiable hunger for pleasure' who 'lived in the midst of dreariness', as Henry James observed, Emma is hauntingly and sympathetically captured in Flaubert's superb, luminescent prose.
In the introduction to this Greenwich House Classics Library edition, Alan Russell describes her as 'self-centered, self-dramatizing, envious, improvident, impulsive, aspiring anbove either her station or her capabilities, sensitive in the egoistic sense, and desperate with the raging of unsatisfied desire,' but 'the romantic malaise, the need to live in dreams, the failure to accept life, the longing for color, for miraculous loves in distant lands' are the positive side of her character with which Flaubert identified."
In the introduction to this Greenwich House Classics Library edition, Alan Russell describes her as 'self-centered, self-dramatizing, envious, improvident, impulsive, aspiring anbove either her station or her capabilities, sensitive in the egoistic sense, and desperate with the raging of unsatisfied desire,' but 'the romantic malaise, the need to live in dreams, the failure to accept life, the longing for color, for miraculous loves in distant lands' are the positive side of her character with which Flaubert identified."
