Emma Bovary is beautiful & bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor & stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion & seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending &, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment & the consequences are devastating. Flaubert`s erotically charged & 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`.