Still, Aveling, and all Flaubert’s English translators before Geoffrey Wall in 1992, made two drastic changes from Flaubert’s original to “normalize” the text for English readers. First, she omitted Flaubert’s italicizations of clichés—a use of irony that has since been used to great advantage by such contemporary American writers as Gary Indiana and Brett Easton Ellis. Second, she simplified Flaubert’s use of tenses, using mainly just the past and present. In the original French, Flaubert uses complex forms of both past and future tenses to enact Emma’s state of longing and further enter her mind. For example, at the end of part one, chapter seven, Aveling translates “Emma went across the road,” whereas Flaubert wrote, “Emma would go across the road.” This odd and consciously nostalgic use of tense as an emotional trigger would later be used by Georges Perec, himself a child of the Naturalists, in his book Les Choses:A Story of the Sixties (1967).

Born in London in 1855, Eleanor, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, was largely educated by her father, against whom she rebelled by falling in love with Hippolyte Prosper Lissagaray, a French journalist twice her age. She co-wrote Histoire de la Commune de 1871 (1876) with Lissagaray and eventually translated it as History of the Commune of 1871. At twenty-one, Marx successfully managed a female candidate’s campaign for a seat on the London School Board, at a time when women didn’t yet have the vote. Later she co-founded the Socialist League in London with William Morris and worked with Clementina Black and Annie Besant in the Women’s Trade Union League. She wrote or co-wrote several more books, including The Factory Hell (1885), The Woman Question (1886), Shelley’s Socialism (1888), and The Working Class Movement in England (1896).

During the early 1880s, Marx met and began living with Edward Aveling, a socialist journalist; she would live with him in a common-law marriage until her death. Her interests shifted to theater. She began acting, and learned Norwegian in order to translate two plays by Henrick Ibsen: A Doll’s House and The Lady from the Sea. Together, she and Aveling staged a London production of A Doll’s House. This is the period of her life during which she translated Madame Bovary. She also translated her friend Amy Levy’s poetry into German. Eventually, she returned to politics. Renowned as an orator and in great demand as Karl Marx’s daughter, she gave speeches and raised funds for the Gasworkers’ Strike, the Match Girl’s Union, and Irish home rule. She and Edward Aveling toured the United States, where she discussed trade unionism with American cowboys.

Fraught with difficulty, the relationship between Eleanor and Edward Aveling lasted for fifteen years. After she nursed him through a long illness, he left her to live with a much younger actress, Eva Frye, whom he secretly married. Eleanor Marx Aveling committed suicide by ingesting prussic acid in 1898 at the age of forty-three. This poison is faster-acting, though no less brutal, than the arsenic Emma Bovary swallowed. Some historians suggest that Aveling coaxed her into a double suicide pact from which he reneged, but nothing is proved.

To MARIE-ANTOINE-JULES SENARD1

MEMBER OF THE PARIS BAR

EX-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY, AND FORMER

MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR.

DEAR AND ILLUSTRIOUS FRIEND:

PERMIT me to inscribe your name at the head of this book, and above its dedication; for it is to you, before all, that I owe its publication. Reading over your magnificent defence, my work has acquired for myself, as it were, an unexpected authority. Accept, then, here, the homage of my gratitude, which, how great soever it is, will never attain the height of your eloquence and your devotion.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a “new fellow,” not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work.

The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-master, he said to him in a low voice—

“Monsieur Roger, here is a pupil whom I recommend to your care; he’ll be in the second. If his work and conduct are satisfactory, he will go into one of the upper classes, as becomes his age.”

The “new fellow,” standing in the corner behind the door so that he could hardly be seen, was a country lad of about fifteen, and taller than any of us. His hair was cut square on his forehead like