Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and suffocated by the banality of provincial life. As a passionate reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of great romance, extravagant spending, and ultimately infidelity. Yet even her affairs bring her disappointment, and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically astute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral uproar upon its publication in 1857; it was perceived as so lifelike that many women claimed to be the model for his heroine. Flaubert insisted: Madame Bovary, c'est moi.