Madame Bovary: Provincial Lives

Description

In his Introduction, MacKenzie discusses Flaubert's life, the writing of Madame Bovary, the world in which the novel is set, and its publication and reception. Footnotes, a bibliography, and a chronology are also provided.

Gustave Flaubert was born in 1821 and was raised in Rouen, France. He moved to Paris in 1840 to study law at the College Royal de Rouen. In 1844, his studies ended because of his deteriorating health; it is suspected that he had epilepsy. His father and sister died in 1846, and he moved to Croisset with his mother and niece. There, he occasionally travelled to Paris, but spent most of the remainder of his life in Croisset. He produced realism masterpieces such as Madame Bovary, A Sentimental Education, and Three Tales, paying particular attention to precision and detail. At the time of its release, Madame Bovary caused public controversy -- Flaubert was charged with promoting immorality, but those charges were later dropped. He died of a stroke in 1880. Raymond N. MacKenzie is Professor of English, University of St. Thomas. His other works include a translation of Francois Mauriac's Therese Desqueyroux (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), Baudelaire's Paris Spleen and La Fanfarlo (Hackett, 2008), and Flaubert's Madame Bovary (Hackett, 2009).

After his beautiful translation of Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, Raymond N. MacKenzie now offers us a fresh, superb version of Madame Bovary by Flaubert. Impeccably transparent, this new translation captures the original's careful, precise language and admirably conveys the small-mindedness of nineteenth-century provincial French towns. MacKenzie's tour de force transports the reader to Yonville and compels him to look at Emma with Flaubert's calm, disenchanted eyes. --Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago Raymond N. MacKenzie's fresh and faithful translation of Madame Bovary will enable a new generation of readers to discover the wonderful complexities of Flaubert's sardonic presentation of the yawning gulf between a woman's expectations of life and the realities she finds in nineteenth-century provincial France. By capturing the rhythms of the original French, and adopting a vocabulary which is neither too contemporary nor too dated, MacKenzie gives his readers the opportunity to enter into the heart of one of the great classics of world literature. --Rosemary Lloyd, Rudy Professor of French, Emerita, Indiana University