Introduction

In the early 19 sixties, my maternal grandparents were living in what estate agents call a chalet bungalow on the outskirts of beckonsfield. It was here that i read madame bauvary for the first time. I would have been 15 or 16. The book wasn't my own choice. An iconoclastic english master just down from cambridge had given us a reading list, which, to our surprise, contained foreign authors. And i had high hopes of madame Bauvary - it still had the reputation of being a hot book. After all, it had been prosecuted for outraging pub morals when it first appeared serially in the rev