Emma Bovary is portrayed as a born actress wed to the belief that real life lies in a Romantic netherworld far removed from rural Normandy. Among the greatest scenes in Flaubert’s novel are those that cruelly expose her self-deception. And among these the most ingenious takes place at an agricultural show in Yonville, where Emma and a suave man of means named Rodolphe Boulanger, seated at a tall window behind the town square, witness the spectacle of merchants and peasants assembled to hear a regional councillor glorify animal husbandry. While the government official throws bouquets of rhetoric to the crowd, Rodolphe addresses world-weary rants to Emma. The commotion of livestock being judged for prizes serves as an ironic obbligato to the philanderer’s well-rehearsed script. Theatre answers theatre from either side of the square.
All this Stevenson manages with the virtuosity of a quick-change artist, adapting herself to one persona after another: the full-throated functionary, the practiced libertine, the plaintive wife of a country doctor.
Flaubert, who would have preferred a life onstage to the career in law he was expected to pursue, always read his sentences aloud. Stevenson — whose movies include Truly Madly Deeply and Bend It Like Beckham — gives her all, or all that the translation allows, to their worked beauty and expressiveness. Another example is the oblique description, some chapters later, of Emma having sex behind drawn shades in a hackney carriage circling round and round Rouen, to the bewilderment of onlookers. She and her new lover are unseen, but unseen in flagrante delicto, and unheard except for the lover angrily hectoring the coachman to press on. Here as elsewhere, eros travels recklessly. Heeding Flaubert’s metaphoric cues, Stevenson reads the blind journey as a dirge timed to the beat of horses’ hooves and conducted by a death wish. The scene harks back to the agricultural show, only one or two harvest seasons past in her neighbours’ calendar, but long enough ago for Emma to have descended from the Romantic stage to a harlot’s mobile boudoir. The audience – now facing her – still sees nothing. Animals still attend her love life. She is fallen, still cherishing dreams of elevation.

Emma Bovary pays a hideous price for her doomed yearnings for unbridled passion and escape from her dreary husband, but the novel is as much a portrait of a provincial doctor’s life in nineteenth-century France: the operation on Hippolyte’s club foot that ends in gangrene; the blind beggar’s red flesh caught by the coachman’s whip; the ugly gossip; little Berthe Bovary ending up as a cotton worker… Juliet Stevenson makes us feel Flaubert’s sympathy for them all.