Madame Bovary » (Special Value)

Margaret Mauldon has worked as a translator since 1987. She has translated Zola's L'Assommoir, Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, Huysmans' Against Nature (winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation, 1999), Constant's Adolphe, and Maupassant's Bel-Ami, all for the Oxford World's Classics series. Malcolm Bowie, formerly Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford, is now Master of Christ's College, Cambridge. His publications include Proust Among the Stars, which won the prestigious Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2001.

Madame Bovary is the story of a beautiful young woman who marries a luckless and loutish country doctor. She attempts to escape the narrow confines of her life through a series of passionate affairs, hoping to find in other men the romantic ideal she has always dreamed about. Her recklessness comes back to haunt her, however, and the strong-willed and independent Emma finds herself in a desperate fight for existence.

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