But I also know that I shall never really comprehend the full extent of the damage done to our illusions by Flaubert's great book. I like to look at the impact, in other novels, in films, even in photography. Every observation of Flaubert's has gone into French life with the force of a large meteorite. I do that, too, but Madame Bovary fills another gap. My mother was a Proustian, capable of reinterpreting a host of his observations for her own life. There is no Shakespeare in French literature, and Hugo and Balzac don't quite fit the bill. She just had the wrong ideas about life and – in a modern way, for which I couldn't reproach her – felt entitled to them. She said that she had never met a woman as stupid as Emma, but I was convinced that Emma was far from stupid. When my French mother was 92, I found myself arguing about the book with her. Thirty years later I am still wondering whether this is true. Someone whom I married told me that most women think of life as negatively as Emma did. I've encountered many versions of the brilliantly rendered discussions about human existence that dot the novel, giving it its sharp, ironic edge. Every moment of her terrifying death by arsenic poisoning might be occurring now, before my eyes. I feel I've seen the expanse of white stocking between Emma's ankle-length boots and her long skirt that so excited Flaubert. It may help that my French family come from the part of Normandy in which Flaubert set his story, but I sense that I would love the book as much if I came from Patagonia. But the book has become one of the few works of fiction that I read again and again, decade by decade, and each time it seems different, as if Flaubert and his heroine were following me through life. Like many others, I didn't really like Emma, who seemed neither intelligent nor charming. The story of a suicide of a doctor's wife in rural 1840s Normandy seemed too banal for me. I didn't like Madame Bovary when I first encountered the book as a teenager.

Flaubert novel