Madame Bovary cover art

Madame Bovary

Penguin Classics

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Madame Bovary

By: Gustave Flaubert
Narrated by: Fiona Glascott
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

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 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'.

Public Domain (P)2019 Penguin Audio Classics
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This is a difficult read, not for the way it is written - for Flaubert is a beautiful writer, but because of its content. Not a single character emerges out of this story in a virtuous light, and most of the time I felt like strangling or punching them myself! The narrator is magnificent, she adopted different voices for each character, and even sung the songs beautifully.

A difficult story superbly narrated.

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I find the reader has put in too much unnecessary and exaggerated acting which is distracting. I feel that the actor has injected her own interpretation, rather than leaving it to the listener.

Too much acting can be annoying!

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I loved Fiona for a narrator, her voice fit perfectly to the cadence of the novel, and adjusted for characters in a way that made them distinguishable, which was very helpful for me as the French names all seemed to blend into one without a visual guide. Definitely recommend!

A Wonderful Reading

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