As a provocative tale of passion and complacency, ideals and self-delusions, Madame Bovary remains a milestone in European fiction. In telling his story of Emma Bovary-a farmer's daughter who, with girlhood dreams fuelled by sensational novels, marries a provincial doctor-Flaubert inaugurated a literary mode that would be called Realism. So exacting were Flaubert's standards of authenticity that his portrayal of the breakdown of Emma's marriage, and the frankness with which he treats her adulterous liaisons, scandalized many of his contemporaries.