Gustave Flaubert

First published in French in 1877, "Three Tales" is a collection of three short stories by the celebrated French novelist Gustave Flaubert. The first story in this collection "A Simple Soul" is a story of love and spiritual awakening seen through the simple and apparently unremarkable life of a servant girl. While she has little materially, she retains her ability to love and is devoted to others. "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier" is an...

Emma Bovary, bored by her provincial life, is drawn to a more sophisticated world that will demand a terrible price.

The bored wife of a bumbling provincial physician seeks to escape from the tedium of her life with romantic fantasies and adulterous affairs but is ultimately doomed to disillusionment.

"Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her...

Flaubert offers a vivid and unsparing portrait of the young men of his generation, struggling to salvage something of their ideals in a city where corruption, consumerism, and a pervasive sense of disenchantment undermine all but the most compromised erotic, aesthetic, and social initiatives. Sentimental Education combines thoroughgoing irony with an impartial but unexpectedly intense sympathy in a novel whose realism competes with that of Balzac...