Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert lived with his mother at Croisset, near Rouen, and spent five years on Madame Bovary, searching for the exact word and reading each sentence aloud, then was prosecuted for it as an offence against morals and acquitted. The novel, about a provincial doctor’s wife whose reading has spoiled her for her life, is the model of the impersonal, perfectly made realist novel. Three Tales, with A Simple Heart, is the late work most often assigned. He hated the bourgeois, wrote to Louise Colet and George Sand the best letters on the art of fiction, and had few readers until after his death.