Showing results by author "Gustave Flaubert" in All Categories

Before marrying, Emma Bovary believed she would enter a life of luxury and passion like the sentimental stories she'd read in her novels and magazines. Now married to an ordinary country doctor her life is not the romantic ideal she imagined and seeks an escape through having extra-marital affairs. This devastating spiral into deceit and despair leads to catastrophic consequences. Emma Bovary continues to be enjoyed to this day because of its profound humanity, still as fresh today as when it was first written.

A Signature Performance: Leelee Sobieski’s Emma is sultry but vulnerable, offering a sympathetic rendering of the heroine and her plight, allowing the listener to draw his own conclusions about Madame Bovary in this cautionary tale of love, passion, and desperation.

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.

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, an influential businessman, 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.

In Madame Bovary, one of the great novels of 19th-century France, Flaubert draws a deeply felt and sympathetic portrait of a woman who, having married a country doctor and found herself unhappy with a rural, genteel existence, longs for love and excitement. However, her aspirations and her desires to escape only bring her further disappointment and eventually lead to unexpected, painful consequences. Flaubert’s critical portrait of bourgeois provincial life remains as powerful as ever

She lived in the shadow of others—quietly, dutifully, without question. Her world was small: a kitchen hearth, the rhythm of chores, a parrot who would outlive most dreams. But in that stillness, something vast took root. A devotion so complete, it blurred the line between the sacred and the simple. This story doesn't shout. It listens. It watches. It waits. And by the time it's done, you'll understand how the softest hearts carry the heaviest truths.

Upon arriving home in Normandy, Frederick catches his first glimpse of Marie Arnoux, a mysterious and beautiful woman who leaves a lasting impression on him. Eventually they make each other's acquaintance and Marie becomes a symbol of unattainable perfection for Frederick, whose unrequited infatuation leaves him bouncing from one passion to another, falling in and out of love, money and society.

Issue de la bourgeoisie, Emma Bovary est élevée dans un couvent, où elle fera son "éducation sentimentale" en lisant les œuvres romantiques à la mode. Son mari, Charles Bovary, ne ressemble en rien aux amants mystérieux et délicats de ses lectures : c'est un officier de santé qui exerce dans un village normand où Emma, confrontée à la réalité de la vie quotidienne, va peu à peu perdre pied.

A brilliant psychological portrait, Madame Bovary searingly depicts the human mind in search of transcendence. Acclaimed as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1857, it catapulted Flaubert to the ranks of the world's greatest novelists and ushered in a new age of realism in literature.

Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, Emma is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She believes she was meant for something more—a life of luxury, leisure, and, above all, true and passionate love. She spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and throws herself headlong into a reckless series of doomed affairs. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, she takes drastic action, with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter.

De 1840 à 1867, la vie fait L'éducation sentimentale de Frédéric Moreau et de toute une jeunesse idéaliste qui a préparé dans la fièvre la révolution de 1848. Le roman s'ouvre sur des rêves exaltés et s'achève sur la médiocrité des uns et des autres. Entre temps, la vie s'est écoulée autour de Frédéric, qui semble n'avoir pas plus participé aux mutations de son temps qu'à l'édifice de sa propre destinée potentielle. Au cours de cette existence, Madame Arnoux, dont les apparitions sont autant de surgissements mystiques, tient lieu au jeune homme d'absolu insaisissable.

Emma Bovary, daughter of an uneducated farmer and wife of a dull doctor in northern France, harbors a passion for everything beyond her grasp - sophistication, romance, love, and deliverance from her banal provincial life. Motivated by the primal, idealized, and vain, she seeks adventure. And with each new endeavor, Emma sets for herself an inevitable and inescapable trap.

This is a diverting delight, a window on romance in literature. There are high lovers and low lovers, tragic lovers, comic lovers, and lovers who shouldn’t be doing what they are doing at all and certainly not then and there. There is even Fanny Hill trying not to discover what physical love is about when set upon by an old roué who has paid for the privilege. Though of special interest for lovers and their special lover’s day of St. Valentine, it is an amusing and sometimes surprising collection.

Published at the end of Flaubert’s career, Three Tales is a collection of three compelling short stories about faith, loneliness and love. In "A Simple Heart", a saint-like servant girl begins to experience religious visions of her pet parrot after enduring the loss of loved ones. "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller" presents the origin story of Julian the Hospitaller, who renounces the violence of his past and cares for the indigent. "Herodias", the final story, retells the beheading of St. John the Baptist, and the seduction of Herod by Salome.

L'éducation sentimentale est un roman initiatique, partiellement inspiré des expériences de l'auteur et qui a ouvert la voie au mouvement littéraire du naturalisme, tourné vers la critique sociale et politique. Le jeune provincial Frédéric Moreau, nouvellement bachelier arrive à Paris pour faire des études de droit, il est plein de rêves et d'ambition. C'est alors qu'il croise Madame Arnoux, pour le jeune homme c'est "une apparition" qui le marquera à jamais. Étudiant velléitaire, amoureux insatisfait, entravé par des revers de fortune dans un Paris à la veille des insurrections de 1848, il va naviguer dans une société petite bourgeoise.

Twelve dramatisations of the best love stories ever written, performed by star casts. Treat yourself to this stunning collection of classic stories of love, loss, obstacles overcome and desperate attraction. This is a beautiful, moving and at times thrilling listen which takes you on a journey through the greatest tales of romance ever told. These unmissable, dramatised novels feature stellar performances from fantastic casts including Vanessa Kirby, Hiftu Quasem, Kate Philips, Rory Kinnear, Toby Jones, John Hurt and David Tennant.

Emma Bovary, a beautiful yet naïve young woman living in rural France. Her husband, a kind-hearted physician, is committed to his wife, but Emma soon grows listless and dissatisfied with the provincial life he has provided her with. Yearning for passion, excitement and luxury, Emma daringly engages in various affairs, while accumulating enormous debt as she attempts to live a life beyond her means. A moving and tragic tale of misguided idealism, materialism and the bourgeois lifestyle.

Enjoy the short stories of three of the greatest writers of French literature, for the first time assembled together in audiobook and narrated in a lively way. Guy de Maupassant was an absolute master of the short story genre, delighting in clever plotting, concise style, and efficient storytelling, which he used to produce stunning pieces in a very condensed format. He produced more than 300 short stories; we selected for you nine of the most bizarre, influent, humorous or plain shocking.

When Salambo, the exquisite daughter of Hamilcar, rode into the Roman camp, into Matho's tent, to exchange her beauty for the veil of Carthage - he would throw away victory and forsake his army, his nation, and his soul for the price of her body. Set during the historical struggle between Rome and Carthage, Flaubert's novel offers a richly detailed portrait of the lives and rites of two ancient kingdoms moved by their allegiances to very different gods.

Emma Bovary is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She yearns for excitement and a sense of romance that pulls at her so strongly she is powerless to resist, even though pursuing her dreams will exact a terrible price. Learn why Gustave Flaubert's compelling heroine has enchanted and puzzled readers for centuries.