Madame Bovary (Modern Library)

Madame Bovary is perhaps the first "modern" novel.  It has always been the most popular of Flaubert's books, and the character of Emma Bovary, a beautiful young woman longing to escape from her dull husband and the constrictions of bourgeois life, is one of the most compelling figures in all literature.  The story of her adulteries and financial ruin was so shocking to mid-nineteenth-century readers that the author was charged with "offenses against public morals and religion."  Flaubert's style, with its elegant, sculpted sentences and passionately observed detail, is rendered here in the classic translation by Francis Steegmuller, who has written widely on Flaubert and is the editor and translator of his letters.