Gustave Flaubert

Brought up on a Normandy farm, convent-educated and an avid reader of sentimental novels, Emma Bovary longs for a life of luxury and high romance. She is married to a well-meaning but mediocre country doctor, but she is far from fulfilled. She seeks to escape her boredom through extravagant spending sprees and, eventually, adultery.

A simple heart -- The legend of Saint Julian Hospitater -- Herodias.

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This Penguin Classic is performed by Fiona Glascott, star of Brooklyn and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Geoffrey Wall.
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

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The last work written by Flaubert that was not quite complete by his death in 1880, "Bouvard and Pecuchet" is his characteristically satirical work revolving around two Parisian copy-clerks. Though they meet on a park bench in the middle of a hot summer day, their friendship grows to a remarkable degree, so much so that when one receives an unexpected inheritance, they both decide to dedicate themselves to the exploration of ideas in the countryside....

The story of "A Simple Heart" is simply the story of an obscure life, that of a poor country girl, devout but mystical, devoted without exaltation and tender as fresh bread. She loves successively a man, the children of her mistress, a nephew, an old man whom she cares for and then her parrot, when the parrot is dead, she has it stuffed and, dying in turn, she confuses the parrot with the Holy Spirit.

Flaubert's classic tale, in which the title character turns to spending and a series of affairs to combat the boredom of married life and, heartbroken and crippled by debts, takes drastic action that results in tragedy.