The TV series may be cancelled, but if you’re still hankering for a desperate housewife you can’t do better than Madame Bovary. The 1856 French classic novel by Gustave Flaubert seems so current that ...

The best encounters with classic literature—with Tolstoy, with Proust—forego line-by-line analysis or politically motivated ...

I have read English translations of Madame Bovary four times now, and until this one, by Lydia Davis, I always appreciated Gustave Flaubert's novel with a somewhat removed feeling - stamped it as ...

Filmmakers have been trying to capture Madame Bovary on the screen ever since the movies learned to talk. But, although film technology has improved, the challenge of giving a good account of Gustave ...

Barthes’ pared down adaptation of the Flaubert novel is supple, hard hitting and feels contemporary, even set in the 19th century in a hidebound class conscious Normandy, France. Human behaviour has ...

It may be, as the proverb states, that inside every fat person there is a thin one trying to get out, but it is likely not true that inside every great novel there is a fine film struggling to be made ...

The project to bring the final manuscript and multiple rough drafts to the general public for free took five years – the same time it took the perfectionist 19th century French author to complete his ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. Gustave Flaubert’s great novel Madame Bovary was published in France in 1857, after a notorious obscenity trial, but ...