Episode Details

Gustave Flaubert spent five years writing Madame Bovary, agonizing over every sentence, sometimes producing only a single page in a week. He lived like a hermit in his family estate at Croisset, screaming sentences out the window to test their rhythm, and believed the novelist should be invisible — present everywhere in the text but visible nowhere. The result was a novel so precisely constructed that it became the template for modern literary fiction.

This episode traces Flaubert from his surgeon father's household through the obscenity trial that made Madame Bovary famous, the years of obsessive revision, and the late masterpieces that cemented his reputation as the writer's writer.

• Flaubert's medical family, his early romantic excess, and the pivot to surgical literary precision
• Five years writing Madame Bovary and the obscenity trial that made it a bestseller
• The doctrine of authorial invisibility and le mot juste — finding the one right word
• Sentimental Education, Salammbo, and the unfinished Bouvard et Pecuchet