In nineteenth-century Normandy, between the villages of Tostes and Yonville-l'Abbaye and the city of Rouen, Emma, a farmer's daughter raised in a convent between novels and prayers, marries Charles Bovary, a country doctor, a good man, and discovers that real life does not resemble what she read. The novel follows, in three parts, the path from boredom to adultery, and from adultery to debts and death.
Part One
The book opens in a classroom, through the eyes of a classmate of Charles Bovary, who sees him enter as the "new boy" and be ridiculed for his cap; then that classmate leaves the scene, and the narration goes on without him. Already a doctor, Charles is called at dawn to Bertaux, the farm of Father Rouault, to set a broken leg. There he meets the farmer's daughter, Emma, who is not yet called Bovary. A widower, Charles returns to Bertaux often; the farmer notices his blushing and accepts the proposal, and the wedding takes place the following spring, with a feast under the cart shed. In Tostes, where the couple settles, Emma finds in the bedroom the orange-blossom bouquet of the dead bride, which Charles, noticing her gaze on the flowers, takes to the attic.
The novel then returns to Emma's past, and from then on the narrator fuses his own voice with her thought, without quotation marks or warning. At the convent she confused religion with romance, loving the church for its flowers and languor, and secretly read the cheap books that an old seamstress passed to her. In Tostes her husband disappoints her: banal conversation, no ambition. Charles treats an abscess of the Marquis d'Andervilliers, and the couple is invited to a ball at the castle of La Vaubyessard. There Emma sees lineage, champagne, pomegranates and pineapples, dances the waltz with the Viscount, and returns dizzy. Charles finds on the road a green silk cigar case, which she keeps in the cupboard. Emma buys a map of Paris, subscribes to fashion magazines, abandons the piano and embroidery, and falls ill with nerves. Charles, to cure her, decides to move to Yonville-l'Abbaye, and Emma, pregnant, burns her own wedding bouquet before leaving.
Part Two
In Yonville the Bovarys meet the pharmacist Homais, who invites himself to the arrival dinner, the merchant Lheureux, and the young clerk Léon Dupuis, with whom Emma discovers the same tastes. A daughter is born, Berthe. Emma and Léon draw close during the evenings at the pharmacy, but Emma plays the exemplary wife, and Léon, without hope, leaves for Paris. Shortly afterwards the landowner Rodolphe Boulanger meets Emma and decides to seduce her. On the day of the agricultural show, while a councillor gives a speech and hands out cattle prizes, he courts her and takes her hand. Six weeks later he declares himself, and Emma, who has begun riding on her husband's recommendation, yields in the forest.
In the following months the two meet in secret, exchange letters and see each other at night in the garden. Emma spends on gifts bought on credit from Lheureux, and increasingly demands that Rodolphe run away with her. Meanwhile Homais convinces Charles to operate on the club foot of the stable boy Hippolyte; the operation goes wrong, the leg gangrenes and is amputated, and Emma looks at her husband with contempt. Rodolphe agrees to the flight, set for September 4, and two days before the date decides not to go: he sends her the letter of rupture hidden in a basket of apricots. Emma collapses with a cerebral fever; for forty-three days Charles does not leave her side for a moment. Convalescent, she wants to be a saint, but finds no satisfaction. Charles takes her to Rouen to hear the opera Lucia di Lammermoor, and during the interval Charles meets Léon again, now a clerk in Rouen, and brings him to the box.
Part Three
In Rouen, Léon, no longer shy, declares himself to Emma. She meets him at the cathedral, and the two tour the city in a cab with lowered blinds. Back in Yonville, Emma obtains a power of attorney to manage the couple's property and, under the pretext of piano lessons, begins travelling to Rouen every Thursday to see Léon at the hotel. Expenses grow: curtains, carpet, dresses, and Lheureux makes her sign bills that the banker Vinçart discounts. When one of the bills reaches the house, her mother-in-law steps in, and the relationship with Léon cools, until Emma returns to Yonville after a masked-ball night and finds a summons to pay eight thousand francs within twenty-four hours.
Lheureux denies any extension, the bailiff Hareng makes the inventory of the goods, and a poster announces the sale of the furniture. Emma goes around Rouen looking for money, asks help from the notary Guillaumin, who takes advantage of her distress, from the treasurer Binet, who backs away, and finally from Rodolphe, who refuses calmly. She returns to Yonville, asks Justin for the key to Homais's laboratory, and eats the arsenic from the blue flask. She leaves a letter for Charles, vomits, and the doctors Canivet and Larivière can do nothing. After the extreme unction given by Abbé Bournisien, the blind beggar on the road passes singing, Emma laughs an atrocious laugh, and dies.
Charles has her buried in her wedding dress, in three coffins, of oak, mahogany, and lead. Deeply in debt, he sells the silver and the furniture, finds Rodolphe's letter of rupture and Léon's letters, and dies in the arbor holding a lock of Emma's hair. Berthe is sent to a poor aunt, who puts her to work in a spinning mill. Homais, finally, defeats the blind man with a newspaper campaign, drives three doctors out of Yonville, and receives the Legion of Honor.