FLAUBERT, Gustave.

£4,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Madame Bovary. First edition in English to be printed in Britain, in the attractively decorated cloth. "Eleanor Marx's translation of Madame Bovary has endured like no other... it became the basis of many succeeding editions" (Apter, p. 563)First published in the magazine La Revue de Paris in 1856, Madame Bovary was immediately sued for "outrage aux bonnes moeurs" ("affront to public decency"). Flaubert appeared before the court on 7 February 1857 but was found not guilty, and publication resumed. The ensuing publicity also ensured that upon publication the book became a best-seller. The heroine of the novel, Emma Bovary, ultimately commits suicide by swallowing arsenic - a fate which also befell her translator, Eleanor Marx-Aveling.The publisher, Henry Richard Vizetelly (1820-1894), specialized in translations of French and Russian novels: "Many of them affronted Victorian notions of propriety... It was above all his publication, between 1884 and 1888, of translations of seventeen novels by Emile Zola that brought him notoriety for the first time in his life and turned him into a reluctant martyr, one of the early heroes of the fight against oppressive literary censorship" (ODNB). The first English translation was published in America in 1881, translated by Mary Neal Sherwood under the pseudonym John Stirling. The cloth was issued with variant decorations and, while no priority has yet been proven, it appears this binding is in a second issue. It closely follows the design o

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