Emma Bovary is the protagonist of the novel: daughter of old Rouault and wife of Charles Bovary, a health officer in a provincial village, a woman who expects from life what she read in books and who, between two lovers and a mounting debt, ends up poisoning herself with arsenic.
Her formation comes from before her arrival in Yonville. On the first night in the new house, Emma recalls the other times she slept in an unfamiliar place, the convent, Tostes, and the palace of Vaubyessard, and believes that, since the part already lived had been bad, the part left to her will be better. At the convent, as she recalls later, she already envied the "ineffable feelings of love" that she tried to imagine according to the books, and at the opera in Rouen she finds herself again "in the very midst of Walter Scott." For her, love was supposed to be a "tempest from the heavens," not a choice made every day.
The plot is the sequence of attempts to live that love. In Yonville, Emma falls silently in love with the clerk Léon, who leaves for Paris; she gives herself to the landlord Rodolphe and repeats to herself "I have a lover! A lover!"; she is abandoned before the planned escape; she meets Léon again in Rouen and begins to see him every Thursday. To pay for all this, she buys on credit from the merchant Lheureux, until she receives the summons for eight thousand francs. Léon fails her, she refuses the advances of the notary Guillaumin, Rodolphe says he has no money, and Emma eats arsenic in Homais's pharmacy.
The novel does not reduce her to victim or culprit. Emma changes men and keeps the vocabulary: what she desires is an image, the Viscount, Paris, the passionate woman of novels, and that is why each man she reaches disappoints her and satisfaction recedes to the next one.