Helena Frith Powell is the author of All You Need to Be Impossibly French: A Witty Investigation Into the Lives, Lusts, and Little Secrets of French Women and other books.Back in 2005 she named a top ten list of "sexy French books" for the Guardian.
One title on her list:
Madame Bovary by Gustave FlaubertRead about Frith Powell's criteria for the list and another title on it.
No list of French books of whatever genre is complete without Madame Bovary. The unfortunate heroine, whose only crime is an endless search for romantic love, gives us some of literature's sexiest moments: the mussed-up bed, the carriage ride, the sheer foolishnessof falling in love with French men. Madame Bovary's choice of lovers are 19th-century versions of Bridget Jones's fuckwits.
Madame Bovary is on the Christian Science Monitor's list of six novels about grand passions, John Mullan's lists of ten landmark coach rides in literature, ten of the best cathedrals in literature, ten of the best balls in literature, ten of the best bad lawyers in literature, ten of the best lotharios in literature, and ten of the best bad doctors in fiction, Valerie Martin's list of six novels about doomed marriages, and Louis Begley's list of favorite novels about cheating lovers. It tops Peter Carey's list of the top ten works of literature and was second on a top ten works of literature list selected by leading writers from Britain, America and Australia in 2007. It is one of John Bowe's six favorite books on love.
Writers Read: Helena Frith Powell (February 2009).
--Marshal Zeringue
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