ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
Emma Bovary is the original "desperate housewife": a romantic escaping her all-too-quotidian life as wife and mother through increasingly decadent luxuries and passionate, reckless affairs. This literary seminar and cultural tour explores Gustave Flaubert's classic, controversial, tragic 1856 Madame Bovary -- recently voted one of the two greatest novels ever written -- in a traditional French countryside setting little different from her own.

In the words of a New York Times critic: "Novelists should thank Gustave Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it begins again with him. He is the originator of the modern novel." As another famed critic has noted, it is also the first novel "to take women seriously." The plot is thrilling, Flaubert's observations searing, and his prose acknowledged as the most intricate and exquisite in all of literature.

Participants will arrive having read Madame Bovary in advance. We will then investigate the novel, its history, and its context, through lectures, discussion, activities, and outings. Our mornings will begin with a light French breakfast, from which we will proceed to intensive seminar classes. After lunch we will engage, on alternating days, in reflective writing exercises and excursions in the local area. Supper will be followed by a variety of activities -- including a talk by special guest Matthew Howard of The New York Review of Books on the French press and Flaubert's obscenity trial -- guided discussion, and leisure time.

Autumn is harvest time, the most beautiful of French seasons, with warm, clear days, burgeoning vineyards and orchards, and vast sunflower fields. When we close our books we'll explore open markets, taste wines and eaux de vie -- brandies, or "waters of life" -- ramble around abbeys and castles, and much more. The week may serve as an educational, rejuvenating, memorable adventure unto itself, or may be linked to further travel in Paris, the South of France, nearby Spain, or elsewhere in Europe.

Above photo: Karen Bell