> Skip to content
  • Published: 31 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9780143123804
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $59.99

Madame Bovary: Penguin Drop Caps



Penguin Drop Caps collect twenty-six stunning hardcovers-one for each letter of the alphabet-featuring cover art by lettering superstar Jessica Hische.
It all begins with a letter. Penguin Drop Caps is a series of twenty-six collectable hardcover editions, each featuring a specially commissioned illustrated letter of the alphabet by type designer Jessica Hische. A collaboration between Hische and Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, whose series design encompasses a rainbow-hued spectrum across all twenty-six book spines, Penguin Drop Caps debuted with an 'A' for Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a 'B' for Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and a 'C' for Willa Cather's My Ántonia, and now continues with a 'D' for Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, an 'E' for George Eliot's Middlemarch , and an 'F' for Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

F is for Flaubert. Beautiful but bored, Emma Bovary spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs in an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, she takes drastic action, with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter. In this landmark translation of Gustave Flaubert's masterwork, award-winning writer and translator Lydia Davis honors the nuances and particulars of Flaubert's legendary prose style, giving new life in English to the book that redefined the novel as an art form.

  • Published: 31 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9780143123804
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $59.99

Other books in the series

About the authors

Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a distinguished surgeon and a doctor's daughter. After three unhappy years of studying law in Paris, an epileptic attack ushered him into a life of writing. Madame Bovary won instant acclaim upon book publication in 1857, but Flaubert's frank display of adultery in bourgeois France saw him go on trial for immorality, only narrowly escaping conviction. Both Salammbo (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) were poorly received, and Flaubert's genius was not publicly recognized until Three Tales (1877). His reputation among his fellow writers, however, was more constant and those who admired him included Turgenev, George Sand, Victor Hugo and Zola. Flaubert's obsession with his art is legendary: he would work for days on a single page, obsessively attuning sentences, seeking always le mot juste in a quest for both beauty and precise observation. His style moved Edmund Wilson to say,'Flaubert, by a single phrase - a notation of some commonplace object - can convey all the poignance of human desire, the pathos of human defeat; his description of some homely scene will close with a dying fall that reminds one of great verse or music.' Flaubert died suddenly in May 1880, leaving his last work, Bouvard and Pécuchet, unfinished.