Emma Rouault leaves her father to marry Charles Bovary, an insignificant local doctor, and to live among the bourgeoisie of Yonville. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, Emma fills her head with fantastic notions of gallantry and high romance, which she soon finds lacking in her dull husband. Disillusioned and frustrated she finds solace in a tempestuous love affair with the local squire, naively imagining that he will fulfil her desires.
Torn between her licentiousness and piety, her voracious passion for spending and her constant need for love, Emma Bovary has become one of the greatest, and least conventional, heroines of fiction.