Eleanor Marx-Aveling

The first English Bovary, and still the free one. Eleanor Marx-Aveling worked from the French with real care, and for over a century hers was the version most English readers knew; it is clear, faithful in outline, and readable today. It is also Victorian, and it discreetly softens Flaubert’s harder edges and his sexual frankness, so the cold precision that makes him Flaubert is dulled a little. Later translators have corrected its slips. Choose it to read Bovary at no cost in a dependable, if gentler, English, not for the last word on Flaubert’s style.