In this masterpiece Flaubert tells the tale of Emma Bovary, an incurably romantic woman who finds herself trapped in an unsatisfactory marriage in a prosaic bourgeois French village. Her attempts to escape the tedium of her life through a series of adulterous affairs are thwarted by the reality that the men she chooses to love are shallow and self-centered and unable to love anyone but themselves.

In love with a love that can never be, Emma Bovary becomes a tragic figure of almost mythic proportion. Emma is the victim of her own imagination. A lesser woman would have been satisfied in the constrained world Emma inhabits, but Emma is possessed of both splendid passions and tremendous energy; she is an artist and a rebel.