Madame Bovary1992
The warm, readable Penguin. Geoffrey Wall, Flaubert’s biographer, gives a fluent, characterful English that moves easily and keeps the irony alive without the near-clinical closeness of Davis. It is a touch freer with Flaubert’s exact shapes in exchange for readability, which many first-time readers will welcome, and his introduction is genuinely illuminating. If Davis feels too severe and Marx-Aveling too old-fashioned, Wall is the comfortable middle: modern, graceful, and trustworthy.