The Doctor's Wife (Oxford World's Classics)

click here for more details, find new or used items	M.E. Braddon Our price £6.99 (£9.99) New from £3.44 Used from £3.44 Pages: 464 (Paperback) Editor: Lyn Pykett ISBN: 0192833014 Pub: Oxford Paperbacks Pub date: 1998-11-05 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 186783

Reader Reviews:

A Brilliant Read (3/8 people found this helpful)

I also enjoyed this a lot more than Madame Bovary. It is an enthralling read that pulls you along.

The characters are fleshed out and not typical Victorian representations.

One of the best of Braddon's books.

Better than Bovary (in my opinion anyway). (9/10 people found this helpful)

Ignore all the dry-as-dust academic blurb on the cover and in the introduction to this novel, if you take any notice of that you'll be put off reading it, and then you would be missing a treat. In "The Doctor's Wife" Mrs Braddon (never one to be put off "borrowing" a good idea) decided to do her own version of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary", and I must admit I had misgivings about this. For a good while it was hard to shake off Flaubert's novel as the stories, for the first half of the book, are so very similar. Isobel Gilbert, like Emma Bovary, is a young woman with a hopelessly romantic outlook on life, fuelled by her insatiable appetite for romantic fiction. She meets and marries George Gilbert, a promising young doctor in a small town in the fictional county of Midlandshire, and soon finds that married life isn't all romance.

About halfway through the book though Braddon's book breaks away completely from Flaubert's. Yes, like Emma, Isobel becomes infatuated with the handsome young local lord of the manor, and finds that he's not exactly immune to her charms either. But whereas Emma is quite hard-bitten and socially-ambitious, Isobel's love of romantic fiction has stymied her development, and she is stuck at the level of being a starry-eyed innocent schoolgirl, unable to cope when her admirer wants to move the relationship onto a more prosaic level.

This book is very Victorian in places and that might put off the modern reader. For instance, the dark sentimentality, the protracted death-bed scenes, the long speeches (where the characters don't seem to be having a conversation so much as "addressing a public meeting", as Queen Victoria once famously said about Gladstone), and Isobel's tendency to start fainting when it all gets too much, can take a bit of swallowing, but bear with it, as this is a really beautiful book. It seems unfair that Mrs Braddon has been dismissed since her lifetime as being nothing more than a Victorian sensation scribbler, a sort of sub-Wilkie Collins. It's unfair because she simply wrote so beautifully, and the scenes in this book brim with life and a deep, wide-eyed understanding of human nature. It's also very moving in parts, most particularly George's final remarks to his wife, which are very moving in their simplicity.

I personally think it's better than "Madame Bovary" simply because, although Flaubert's novel is undoubtedly good, I also found it relentlessly grim. He simply seems to offer no hope for ANYONE! I often admire French authors for their clear-headed lack of sentimentality (Zola for instance), but sometimes they can take it a tad too far! I was annoyed by the somewhat lofty and indifferent analysis of "The Doctor's Wife" given in the intro to my copy. Ignore all that, just enjoy a bloomin' good story!

Read this - it's marvellous! (8/9 people found this helpful)

Brilliant! This is a wonderful book which I couldn't put down. It's an English adaptation of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" which has far more wit and humour than the original. It's funny, exciting and fascinating. Why on earth has it been out of print for so long?

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