The Doctor's Wife (Oxford World's Classics) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

With The Doctor's Wife, Mary Elizabeth Braddon rewrote Flaubert's Madame Bovary, exploring the heroine's sense of entrapment and alienation in middle-class provincial life. A woman with a secret, adultery, death, and the spectacle of female recrimination and suffering are the elements which combine to make The Doctor's Wife a classic women's sensation novel. The novel is also self-consciously literary, however, and Braddon attempts to transcend the sensation genre. This volume, which reproduces uncut the first three-volume edition of 1864, is the only edition of the novel available today.