Madame Bovary (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

FLAUBERT, Gustave (trans. J. Lewis May; intro. Jacques de Lacretelle; illus. Pierre Brissaud; engraved Theo Schmied). Madame Bovary. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1978.

Large 8vo. Full deep blue leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. viii, 348 pp. Black and white illustrations by Pierre Brissaud, engraved in wood by Theo Schmied, throughout; portrait frontispiece of the author. Collector's Edition. Part of the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" series. First Easton Press edition.

Gustave Flaubert spent five years writing Madame Bovary and published it in serial form in the Revue de Paris in 1856. Within months, both author and publisher were prosecuted by the French government on charges of immorality and offence to public morals. Both were acquitted. When the novel appeared in book form in 1857 it was immediately recognised as something unprecedented: a work of such technical precision and such unsparing psychological intelligence that the whole existing tradition of the novel looked, in retrospect, somewhat approximate. It has never lost that quality.

Emma Rouault is the daughter of a Norman farmer who has educated herself, not wisely, on a diet of romantic fiction. She marries Charles Bovary, a provincial doctor of adequate competence and no imagination, and discovers that provincial life and marriage bear no resemblance to the world she had been reading about. The discovery does not lead her to adjust her expectations; it leads her to pursue them elsewhere — through two successive affairs, through mounting debt incurred in the furnishing of a fantasy life she cannot afford, and through the gradual, devastating unravelling of every resource, material and emotional, that she has. Flaubert's achievement is to make Emma simultaneously impossible to admire and impossible to dismiss; the novel condemns her romanticism and the society that produced it in exactly equal measure, and its famous irony is not cruelty but precision.

The prose style Flaubert developed for this novel — the celebrated style indirect libre, in which narration and character consciousness blur into each other without quotation marks or attribution — was so revolutionary that its influence cannot be bounded. It runs through Maupassant, Chekhov, James, Woolf, Hemingway, and beyond: essentially every major development in the literary handling of interiority in the century and a half since publication passes through Madame Bovary in some way. Flaubert is said to have described his heroine as himself: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Whether or not he said it, it is true in the sense that matters — he understood her completely.

The illustrations by Pierre Brissaud (1885–1964) — the French artist known for his elegant work in Vogue and the Gazette du Bon Ton — are engraved in wood by Théo Schmied (1873–1948), the Swiss-born master engraver and bookmaker whose editions are among the most refined productions of the Art Deco period. The introduction is by Jacques de Lacretelle (1888–1985), the French novelist and member of the Académie française, whose literary authority on the subject is unimpeachable. The translation by J. Lewis May carries the novel's precise irony into English with fidelity and care.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000485