Read more
Madame Bovary, often ranked among the greatest novels of all time, is considered Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece, with authors from Henry James to Proust to Nabokov heaping it with praise. The novel tells the story of Madame Bovary, a commoner wife of a country doctor, and her attempts to escape the drudgery of day-to-day mediocrity by engaging in adulterous affairs and overspending on luxuries. She remains unsatisfied even though her husband adores her and they want for little, and her shallowness eventually leads to their ruin. Today Madame Bovary, with its careful but charming description of the banality of everyday life, is considered the first great example of literary realisim in fiction novels. Eleanor Marx-Aveling's translation, though over a hundred years old, is remarkably fresh and smooth, and is a pleasure even for modern
About the author
The Temptation of St. Antony, Vol. 7: Or, a Revelation of the Soul
Some ten paces or so from the cell a tall cross is planted in the ground; and, at the other end of the platform, a gnarled old palm-tree leans over the abyss, for the side of the mountain is scarped; and at the bottom of the cliff the Nile swells, as it were, into a lake.
