The novelist's novelist', wrote Henry James of Flaubert, declaring Madame Bovary his masterpiece. Novelist and masterpiece have been decisively influential and remain an inescapable - at times obsessive - fact of modern literary experience. Doubtless the most remarkable testimony to this is the massive study of Flaubert as author of Madame Bovary undertaken by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and still unfinished at his death, after nearly 3,000 pages. Conceptions of the book have varied strongly and importantly: Zola saw it as providing ‘the code of the new art’ he was developing as naturalism; Nabokov regarded it as essentially ‘a prose poem'; Robbe-Grillet today considers it ‘a nouveau roman before its time', unsettling our assumptions of realism and initiating a whole modern ‘practice of writing'.

From the start, moreover, Flaubert's novel had an intense social reverberation. Brought to trial for offences against family and religion, it gained a notoriety that focused it at once as part of a questioning of marriage, sex, and the role of women. Its achievement was to transpose those given social elements into a new configuration that captured and articulated a fundamental experience of the post-romantic, commercialindustrial, democratic period. Indeed, the depiction of Emma Bovary was appropriated as a general representation and bovarysme entered French and other Western languages as the word for a typical attitude and its understanding. The disturbing aspect of the achievement, to which the trial was one response, involved quite directly Flaubert's artistic creed of impersonality, which was perceived as leaving his work dangerously indifferent, with no clear moral, no message; only what Nietzsche would call ‘the desire for nothing’ and D. H. Lawrence condemn as a withdrawal from life ‘as from a leprosy'. Nietzsche's attack bore too on Madame Bovary as exemplary of what he considered the damaging ‘feminisation’ of modern art and feeling, on the terms of its presentation of - its own implication in - bovarysme.