The obvious difference with the Simmonds is that whereas the Flaubert novel is about a cabined and trapped Frenchwoman, Simmonds’s graphic novel is about a free-spirited young Englishwoman from the cultured middle classes who takes it for granted that she’ll always have a job and can shift homes easily from England to France. I happened to write a detailed synopsis and review of the Flaubert novel a few years ago. In the original novel, Emma marries boring and incompetent provincial doctor Charles Bovary and, to escape the drudgery and boredom of her life, has a series of increasingly doomed affairs, and borrows money recklessly, until her world collapses and she commits suicide.

Eighteen years later Simmonds published Gemma Bovery, a much longer, much wordier, and infinitely more sophisticated graphic novel.Īs the title immediately indicates, the book is a modern take on Flaubert’s classic novel of 1857, Madame Bovary, whose ill-fated heroine was named Emma. True Love which Posy Simmonds published in 1981 was, apparently, the first graphic novel in English, although it is more like a set of loosely connected sketches (see my review). ‘Affairs are absolutely OK as long as you don’t get involved and you’re really discreet.’

Instaling Madame Bovary