The publicity sheet for the Viking (US) edition calls Emma ‘the original desperate housewife’, which, cheesy though it sounds, isn’t far off the mark. Madame Bovary is many things — a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure — but it is also the first great shopping-and-fucking novel.

Julian Barnes, « Translating Madame Bovary »,
Through the Window, Vintage, 2012