(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)<br><br>In <i>Madame Bovary</i>, his story of a shallow, deluded, unfaithful, but consistently compelling woman living in the provinces of nineteenth-century France, Gustave Flaubert invented not only the modern novel but also a modern attitude toward human character and human experience that remains with us to this day. One of the rare works of art that it would be fair to call perfect, <i>Madame Bovary</i> has had an incal?culable influence on the literary culture that followed it. This translation, by Francis Steeg?muller, is acknowledged by common consensus as the definitive English rendition of Flaubert's text.