Long established as one of the greatest novels, the book has been described as a "perfect" work of fiction. Henry James wrote: "Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone: it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment."[12] Marcel Proust praised the "grammatical purity" of Flaubert's style, while Vladimir Nabokov said that "stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do".[13] Similarly, in his preface to his novel The Joke, Milan Kundera wrote, "not until the work of Flaubert did prose lose the stigma of aesthetic inferiority. Ever since Madame Bovary, the art of the novel has been considered equal to the art of poetry."[14] Giorgio de Chirico said that in his opinion "from the narrative point of view, the most perfect book is Madame Bovary by Flaubert".[15] Julian Barnes called it the best novel that has ever been written.[16]
The novel exemplifies the tendency of realism, over the course of the nineteenth century, to become increasingly psychological, concerned with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than of external things.[17] As such it prefigures the work of modernist novelists Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.
The book was controversial upon its release: its scandalous subject matter led to an obscenity trial in 1856. Flaubert was acquitted.[18] Le Figaro was negative of the work.[19] They stated, "Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer."[19]
