Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary. v1, 30 Sep 2017
 

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was a a highly influential French novelist, and was thought to be the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. He is known for his scrupulous devotion to style and aesthetics, and was a mentor of Guy de Maupassant.

Madame Bovary was his first published work. It took him five years to complete, and was first published as a serial in 1856 which told of the wife of a dull and unimaginative doctor, and the affairs with which she tried to escape her empty provincial life. Flaubert and his publisher were put on trial for obscenity, and after their acquittal in 1857 the book became a best-seller.

The book was translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling, 1855-1898, who was the youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She poisoned herself soon after she discovered that her partner, Edward Aveling, had married another woman.

The source text was taken from the University of Adelaide ebook library, and checked against the 1919 Alfred A. Knopf edition in the Internet Archive. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotation marks, replaced italics, diacritics, and scene breaks, and made changes to hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com. The source text has many 'Translator's Notes' as footnotes; I have made them end notes and added more.