‘Madame Bovary’: The one book famous authors recommend the most
We all have that one story that we live and breathe by, books that we can revisit time and time again and discover something new in their pages, with every read.
“Writing fiction is for me a fraught business,” Joan Didion once told The Paris Review, “An occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through.”
The power of fiction lies in this paradox: finding inspiration from reality and channelling it into a made-up story, creating a balance between real and imaginary. Still, it creates the most thrilling writing and reading process, defining how we perceive the world around us and continuing to transpire over generations.
Even the literary “greats” of times gone by have their personal favourite works that, in many cases, informed their own works. Consulting 68 “favourites” lists from acclaimed authors, ranging from the classics (including Jorge Luis Borges, F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway) to contemporaries (including Mary Gaitskill, Stephen King and George Saunders), Emily Temple, writing for Literary Hub, parsed through to find the author and their respective works that continually resurfaced, across generations, compiling a list of those most-often mentioned.
Some of the results leaned towards obvious classics, such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch and James Joyce’s Ulysses were mentioned in six ‘favourites’ lists, as were two works by Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Henry James reigns as the most recommended author, with eight of his works featured across the various favourites lists. Marcel Proust’s seven-part novel is aptly mentioned seven times (combining the mentions of the several volumes into one) by the likes of Henry Miller and Michael Chabon, but the winning book, with a total of nine mentions, is French writer Gustave Flaubert’s controversial 1957 debut novel, Madame Bovary.
Madame Bovary follows the eponymous Emma Bovary, a farm girl raised in a convent who possesses romantic, adventurous visions of marriage that were born from her love of romantic novels, and when she does get married, to Charles, a well-meaning but dull doctor, she becomes progressively unhappy and seeks an escape from her middle-class mundanity, indulging in extramarital affairs and luxuries.
With its emphasis on 19th-century realism, Flaubert writes from a psychological perspective, portraying the spectrum of human emotions with a poetic language distinct to his tone, and in turn, Madame Bovary became an infamous sensation when it was first serialised in Revue de Paris in late 1856. Published over the course of two months, the novel gained the attention of public prosecutors, who attacked the work on the grounds of obscenity and charged him with committing an “outrage to public morality and religion”, and was brought to trial when, in January 1957, his work was deemed notorious.
Flaubert was acquitted the following month, and Madame Bovary, published in two volumes, became a bestseller and was much more well-received. Today, Flaubert’s story is held in regard as a masterpiece, an influential work of literary fiction that continues to affect writers’ approaches to fiction. Proust praised Flaubert’s “grammatical purity” in his writing style, while Vladimir Nabokov lauded the work, stating that “stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do.”
In his 1914 work Notes on Novelists, Henry James wrote, “Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone: it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment.”
In regard to favourites, Madame Bovary earned its place on the following writers’ lists: Gatiskill, Hemingway, Sloane Crosley, Bret Easton Ellis, Helen Fielding, Philip Roth, Claire Messud, Lorrie Moore and John Irving. Persisting across generations of writers, Flaubert’s work transcended scandal and became a classic of its time, challenging both social and literary norms that paved the way for modernist writers to continue on.
