Madame Bovary, the debut novel of Gustave Flaubert, was first published serially from October to December 1856. In April 1857, when it was first published as a single-volume book, it became an instant bestseller. Clive James has written of it, "Everyone should read it. Everyone would read it, given a free taste." For many, it established a new era of storytelling, modern realism. For others, it represents the bourgeois novel. What is certain is that it has marked itself as one of the most generative novels of the 19th century; since its publication, it's been adapted to graphic novel form, opera, and several films. Today, we celebrate the importance of Madame Bovary by looking back at some of our favorite writers' opinions on Flaubert's best-known novel.
 

1) Lydia Davis on Translating Madame Bovary in New York Magazine
“You’d think, working from one text, that the translations have got to be fairly similar. But it’s amazing how different they all are. Some are fairly close, but then they’ll add a metaphor that Flaubert doesn’t have. And some are outrageously far away. Two of the most popular, Steegmuller and Hopkins—they’re not bad books. They’re well written in their own way. But they’re not close to what Flaubert did.”

2) Nabokov on Madame Bovary in comparison to other novels in Lectures on Literature
"We may look in vain among the pages of Anna Karenin for Flaubert's subtle transitions, within chapters, from one character to another. The structure of Anna Karenin is of a more conventional kind, although the book was written twenty years later than Flaubert's Madame Bovary... From this account of the structure of Tolstoy's novel it will be seen that the transitions are far less supple, far less elaborate, than the transitions from group to group in Madame Bovary within chapters. The brief abrupt chapter in Tolstoy replaces the flowing paragraph in Flaubert. But it will be also noted that Tolstoy has more lives on his hands than had Flaubert. With Flaubert a ride on horseback, a walk, a dance, a coach drive between village and town, and innumerable little actions, little movements, make those transitions from scene to scene within the chapters. In Tolstoy's novel great, clanging, and steaming trains are used to transport and kill the characters — and any old kind of transition is used from chapter to chapter, for instance beginning the next part or next chapter with the simple statement that so much time has passed and now this or that set of people are doing this or that in this or that place. There is more melody in Flaubert's poem, one of the most poetical novels ever composed; there is more might in Tolstoy's great book."

3) Julian Barnes on various translations of Madame Bovary in the London Review of Books
"To compare several different versions of Madame Bovary is not to observe a process of accumulation, some gradual but inevitable progress towards certainty and authority (except in the occasional discarding of error); rather, it is to gaze at a sequence of approximations, a set of deliquescences. How could it be otherwise when almost every word of the French can be rendered in several different ways? Consider the moment when Emma, Charles and Léon are eating ice-cream in a café by the harbour, having walked out before the final scene of Lucia. Charles naively suggests that his wife stay on in the city to catch the next performance – an action which precipitates her affair with Léon. Charles addresses his wife (the banality of phrase contrasting with the recent flourishes of Donizetti) as ‘mon petit chat’. Marx Aveling has ‘pussy’, Mildred Marmur (1964) ‘my kitten’, Wall ‘my pussy-cat’, Hopkins ‘darling’, Steegmuller ‘sweetheart’, Russell and Davis ‘my pet’. Marx Aveling’s endearment would work then but sadly not now; Marmur’s is good; Wall’s brings in the slightly unwanted flavour of a bad Dean Martin movie; Steegmuller and Hopkins deliberately duck the felinity (you could argue that the French is already drained of it anyway); while Russell and Davis, mixing banality and distant animality, have found the best solution. Probably. At least for the moment. You can understand why Rutherford called translation a ‘strange business’ which ‘sensible people’ should best avoid."

4) James Wood on the style of Madame Bovary in The New Republic
"It is hard not to resent Flaubert for making fictional prose stylish—for making style a problem for the first time in fiction. After Flaubert, and in particular after Flaubert's letters, style is always mirrored, always self-conscious, always a trapped decision. Style became religious with Flaubert, at the same moment that religion became a kind of literary style, a poetry, with Renan. Flaubert himself admired Rabelais, Cervantes, and Molière as if they were beasts of mere instinct: "they are great… because they have no techniques." Such writers "achieve their effects, regardless of Art," he wrote to his lover Louise Colet in 1853. But Flaubert could not be free as those writers: "One achieves style only by atrocious labour, a fanatic and dedicated stubbornness." He was imprisoned in scruple, and he imprisoned his successors in scruple. He is the novelist from whom the Modern, with all its narrow freedoms, flows.

5) AS Byatt on being terrified reading Madame Bovary in The Guardian
"Reading Madame Bovary for the first time was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life - at least up to that point. I was a very young woman - not even eighteen. I was au pair in the French provinces in the 1950s, and I read Madame Bovary in French, sitting in the furrow of a vineyard. I was like Emma Rouault before she became Madame Bovary, someone whose most intense life was in books, from which I had formed vague images of passion and adventure, love and weddings, marriage and children. I was afraid of being trapped in a house and a kitchen. Madame Bovary opened a vision of meaninglessness and emptiness, which was all the more appalling because it was so full of things, clothes and furniture, rooms and gardens. The worst thing of all was that it was the books that were the most insidious poison. Recently Madame Bovary appeared in a British newspaper listing of the 'fifty best romantic reads.' It was, and is, the least romantic book I have ever read. If I have come to love it , it is because now I am half a century older, and not trapped in a house and kitchen, I can equably sympathise with the central person in the book, who is its author - endlessly inventive, observant, and full of life."