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Reading lists

Must-read classics in translation

FRENCH CLASSICS FEATURED

Where to start with French Classics

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The ultimate Eurovision-inspired reading list

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Features

Text conversations from classic novels

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What book to read, based on your favourite Christmas song

A full-cast BBC Radio dramatisation

Madame Bovary

John Hurt stars in this BBC radio dramatisation of Gustave Flaubert’s infamous tale of adultery and tragedy 
 
Beautiful Emma meets and marries Doctor Charles Bovary. He's happy for the first time in his life – but Emma is distraught that her marriage lacks the passion and romance of her fantasies. 
 
Dazzled by the splendour of a Marquis’ ball, she longs for excitement and soon becomes infatuated with a young solicitor, Léon Dupuis. But when Dupuis moves away, her memories of him lead her to despair – and into the arms of wealthy landowner, Rodolphe Boulanger. 
 
As she moves from one illicit liaison to another, Emma’s complicated life begins to unravel. Exhausted from her debts and her affairs, she feels she is left with only one course of action… 
 
A French masterpiece of betrayal and wantonness, Flaubert’s notorious novel features Sarah Smart as Emma Bovary, Conrad Nelson as Charles, Jude Akuwudike as Rodolphe and James D’Arcy as Léon. 
 
Cast and credits 
Narrator – John Hurt 
Charles – Conrad Nelson 
Emma – Sarah Smart 
Madame Bovary Snr – Brigit Forsyth 
Monsieur Rouault/Maître Guillaumin – Russell Dixon 
Viscomte/Dr Lariviere – Martin Reeve 
Nastasie/Mère Rollet – Julie McCabe 
Madame Lefrancois – Siobahn Finneran 
Monsieur Homais/Priest – David Fleeshman 
Léon Dupuis – James D’Arcy 
Monsieur Lheureux – Seamus O’Neill 
Félicité – Sarah Jayne Hallworth 
Rodolphe Boulanger – Jude Akuwudike 
Justin – Sam Curtis 
Berthe Bovary – Daisy Jones 
 
Written by Gustave Flaubert 
Dramatised by Diana Griffiths from a translation by Margaret Mauldon 
Pianist: Stephen Reynolds 
Produced by Pauline Harris 
 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 4-15 September 2006

A Simple Heart

'She decided she would teach him to speak and he was very soon able to say, 'Pretty boy!', 'Your servant, sir!' and 'Hail Mary!'' 
 
With pathos and humour, Flaubert imagines the unexamined life of a servant girl. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). Flaubert's works available in Penguin Classics are Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, Three Tales and Salammbo.

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). Flaubert's works available in Penguin Classics are Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, Three Tales and Salammbo.

'She decided she would teach him to speak and he was very soon able to say, 'Pretty boy!', 'Your servant, sir!' and 'Hail Mary!''

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Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821. After illness interrupted a career in law, he retired to live with his widowed mother and devote himself to writing. His greatest works include Madame Bovary (1857), Sentimental Education (1857) and Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881). He achieved limited success in his own lifetime, but his fame and reputation grew steadily after his death in 1880. 
 
Geoffrey Wall is a literary biographer, translator and travel writer. His biography of Flaubert, published in 2001, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His translations of Flaubert for Penguin include Madame Bovary, Selected Letters, The Dictionary of Received Ideas, Sentimental Education and Three Tales. 
 
Michèle Roberts is the half-English half-French writer of ten highly praised novels.

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi'.

Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821. Aside from journeys to the Near East, Greece, Italy, and North Africa, and a stormy liaison with the poetess Louise Colet, his life was dedicated to the practice of his art. The success of Madame Bovary (1857) was ensured by government prosecution for "immorality"; Salammbô (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) received a cool public reception; not until the publication of Three Tales (1877) was his genius popularly acknowledged. His final bitterness and disillusion were vividly evidenced in the savagely satiric Bouvard and Pécuchet, left unfinished at his death in 1880. 
 
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and several collections of short fiction. She is also the translator of numerous works from the French by, among others, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve and Michel Leiris, and was recently named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. She received great acclaim for her translation of Proust's The Way by Swann's for Penguin Classics and her Collected Stories have just been published by Hamish Hamilton.

A major new translation of one of the most popular classics of all time, now in a gorgeous deluxe edition. 
 
Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi'.

Flaubert - Sand

The Correspondence of Gustave Flaubert & George Sand

Gustave Flaubert was born in 1821 in Rouen, Normandy, the son of a chief surgeon. He reluctantly studied law in Paris, but ceased after a series of nervous attacks. He stayed in the family home at Croisset and dedicated himself to writing. He was unsuccessfully prosecuted for his first masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1857), which met with popular, if not critical, success. George Sand was one of the few critics to praise his next book, Salammbô (1862), thus instigating a long friendship. His other works include Sentimental Education (1869) and The Temptation of St Anthony (1874). His uncompleted comic novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, was published after his death in 1880. His correspondence with George Sand was published in 1884. 
 
George Sand was the pseudonym of Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin. She was born in Paris in 1804, the daughter of an army officer. After his death she lived with her grandmother in the château de Nohant, near La Châtre. At 18 she married Casimir Dudevant, the illegitimate son of a baron. Nine years later she left him and went to Paris with her two children. She scandalized bourgeois society with her controversial novels and her numerous love affairs. After 1848 she settled again in Nohant. Her complete works, over 100 volumes, include autobiographies as well as novels and plays. Her letters were published after her death in 1876.

Translated, this correspondence, from 1863-76, is unique in the history of French literature. Never have two great writers set down their ideas so candidly and over so long a period on the most varied topics, including the genesis of their own writings, a commentary on the Paris theatre, gossip from the literary world and their own domestic lives.

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821. Aside from journeys to the Near East, Greece, Italy, and North Africa, and a stormy liaison with the poetess Louise Colet, his life was dedicated to the practice of his art. The success of Madame Bovary (1857) was ensured by government prosecution for "immorality"; Salammbô (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) received a cool public reception; not until the publication of Three Tales (1877) was his genius popularly acknowledged. His final bitterness and disillusion were vividly evidenced in the savagely satiric Bouvard and Pécuchet, left unfinished at his death in 1880. 
 
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and several collections of short fiction. She is also the translator of numerous works from the French by, among others, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve and Michel Leiris, and was recently named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. She received great acclaim for her translation of Proust's The Way by Swann's for Penguin Classics and her Collected Stories have just been published by Hamish Hamilton.

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi'. 
 
A new translation by Lydia Davis

Salammbo

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821.  After illness interrupted a career in law, he retired to live with his widowed mother and devote himself to writing.  He achieved limited success in his own lifetime, but his fame and reputation grew steadily after his death in 1880.

An epic story of lust, cruelty, and sensuality, this historical novel is set in Carthage in the days following the First Punic War with Rome.

Three Tales

Three stories that form Flaubert's last complete work and reveal him as a master of the short story form.

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness and religious experience, and together form a triumphant conclusion to Flaubert's literary career.  With elegant simplicity, 'A Simple Heart' relates the story of Félicité - an uneducated serving-woman who retains her Catholic faith despite a life of desolation and loss. Inspired by a stained-glass window in Rouen cathedral, 'The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator' describes the fate of Julian, a sadistic hunter destined to murder his own parents. The blend of faith and cruelty that dominates this story may also be found in 'Herodias' - a reworking of the tale of Salomé and John the Baptist.

Sentimental Education

The story of a life-long infatuation, which is seen by many as Flaubert's masterpiece

Part love story, part historical novel, part satire, and an evocative tale youthful passion, Gustave Flaubert's A Sentimental Education is translated by Robert Baldick and revised with an introduction by Geoffrey Wall in Penguin Classics. 
 
Frederic Moreau is a law student returning home to Normandy from Paris when he first notices Mme Arnoux, a slender, dark woman several years older than himself. It is the beginning of an infatuation that will last a lifetime. He befriends her husband, influential businessman Jacques Arnoux, and their paths cross and re-cross over the years. Through financial upheaval, political turmoil and countless affairs, Mme Arnoux remains the constant, unattainable love of Moreau's life. Flaubert described his sweeping story of a young man's passions, ambitions and amours as 'the moral history of the men of my generation'. Based on his own unrequited love for an older woman, Sentimental Education is one of the greatest French novels of the nineteenth century. 
 
Geoffrey Wall's fresh revision of Robert Baldick's original translation is accompanied by an insightful new introduction discussing the personal and historical influences on Flaubert's writing. This edition also contains a new chronology, further reading and explanatory notes. 
 
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was born in Rouen. After illness interrupted a career in law, he retired to live with his widowed mother and devote himself to writing. Madame Bovary won instant acclaim upon book publication in 1857, but Flaubert's frank display of adultery in bourgeois France saw him go on trial for immorality, only narrowly escaping conviction. Both Salammbo (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) were poorly received, and Flaubert achieved limited success in his own lifetime - but his fame and reputation grew steadily after his death. 
 
If you enjoyed A Sentimental Education, you may also enjoy Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women, available in Penguin Modern Classics.

Flaubert was born in 1821. After illness ended a career in law, he retired to live with his mother and devote himself to writing. He achieved limited success in his own lifetime, but his reputation grew steadily after his death in 1880. 
 
 
Geoffrey Wall teaches French at the University of York. His biography of Flaubert has been translated into four languages.

Sentimental Education begins with the hero - Frederic Moreau - leaving Paris and returning to the provinces and his mother.  Part love story, part historical novel and satire it tells of how Moreau is driven by passion for an unattainable older woman. His 'sentimental education' turns out to be more of an anxious quest than a happy one, echoing Flaubert's own life experience of unrequited love. Packed with vivid detail and characterised by its historical authenticity, the book was described by Flaubert as 'the moral history of the men of my generation'.

Penguin Classics

'A masterpiece' Julian Barnes 
 
Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of a married woman's affair caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. Its heroine, Emma Bovary, is stifled by provincial life as the wife of a doctor. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, she seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and when real life continues to fail to live up to her romantic expectations, the consequences are devastating. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.' 
 
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Geoffrey Wall 
With a Preface by Michèle Roberts

Patterns of Provincial Life

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Described by Henry James as 'one of the first of the classics' and so regarded ever since, MADAME BOVARY has touched generations of readers and moulded generations of writers. The story of a little woman in a provincial town who dreams of happiness and then perishes by her own hand is worked up by Flaubant into a profound and heart rending study of human bondage.