Flaubert's Madame Bovary

1856

Gustave Flaubert's novel about a provincial doctor's wife who poisons herself after squalid adulteries was serialized in the Revue de Paris and promptly prosecuted for obscenity. Flaubert was acquitted. The book - exact, pitiless, perfectly written - is usually cited as the first modern novel, and the one that taught fiction how to look at the middle class.