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Product Description
Product Description
`Isabel Gilbert was not a woman of the world. She had read novels while other people perused the Sunday papers...she believed in a phantasmal world created out of the pages of poets and romancers.' The Doctor's Wife is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's rewriting of Flaubert's Madame Bovary in which she explores her heroine's sense of entrapment and alienation in middle-class provincial life married to a good natured but bovine husband who seems incapable of understanding his wife's imaginative life and feelings. 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. Yet, The Doctor's Wife is also a self-consciously literary novel, in which Braddon attempts to transcend the sensation genre. This is the only edition of a fascinating and engrossing work, and reproduces uncut the first three-volume edition of 1864.
About the Author
Lyn Pykett is Professor and Head of English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
33 of 34 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Isabel Sleaford lives in a dream world filled with characters from novels by Dickens, Scott and Thackeray. She longs to break away from her boring existence as a children's governess and live the exciting life of one of the heroines in her favourite books. When parish doctor George Gilbert proposes to her, she accepts but quickly finds that her marriage isn't providing the drama and adventure she's been dreaming of. George is a good man, but he's practical, down to earth - and boring, at least in Isabel's opinion. After meeting Roland Lansdell, the squire of Mordred Priory, she becomes even more discontented. Roland is romantic, poetic and imaginative - in other words, he's everything that George isn't...
This is the second Mary Elizabeth Braddon book I've read - the first was the book that she's best known for today, the sensation novel "Lady Audley's Secret". Apparently "The Doctor's Wife" was Braddon's attempt at writing a more serious, literary novel, with a plot inspired by Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary". "The Doctor's Wife" is not very 'sensational' - apart from maybe the final few chapters - and although it's interesting and compelling in a different way, if you're expecting something similar to "Lady Audley" you might be slightly disappointed. At one point in the book, Braddon even tells us "this is not a sensation novel!"
The focus of "The Doctor's Wife" is the development of Isabel Gilbert from a sentimental girl with her head permanently in the clouds into a sensible and mature woman. I didn't like Isabel much at all, though I'm not really sure if I was supposed to. Throughout most of the book she was just so silly and immature - wishing that she would catch a terrible illness or some other tragedy would befall her, just so she could have some excitement in her life - although as several of the other characters pointed out, she wasn't a bad person, just childish and foolish. It was sad that her own romantic notions and ideals were preventing her from having any chance of happiness.
I thought some of the minor characters were much more interesting and I would have liked them to have played a bigger part in the story. I particularly loved Sigismund Smith, who was a friend of both George and Isabel, and a 'sensation author' - probably a parody of Mary Elizabeth Braddon herself. Sigismund (whose real name is Sam) is a writer of 'penny numbers' - cheap, serialised adventure stories. His enthusiasm for his work and his unusual methods of researching his novels provide most of the humour in the book.
Due to Isabel's reading, almost every page contains allusions to characters and events from various novels, plays and poems - most of which I haven't read - so I found myself constantly having to turn to the notes at the back of the book (until I decided I could follow the story well enough without understanding all the references to Edith Dombey and Ernest Maltravers).
Overall, this was another great book from Mary Elizabeth Braddon, although not quite what I was expecting.
This is the second Mary Elizabeth Braddon book I've read - the first was the book that she's best known for today, the sensation novel "Lady Audley's Secret". Apparently "The Doctor's Wife" was Braddon's attempt at writing a more serious, literary novel, with a plot inspired by Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary". "The Doctor's Wife" is not very 'sensational' - apart from maybe the final few chapters - and although it's interesting and compelling in a different way, if you're expecting something similar to "Lady Audley" you might be slightly disappointed. At one point in the book, Braddon even tells us "this is not a sensation novel!"
The focus of "The Doctor's Wife" is the development of Isabel Gilbert from a sentimental girl with her head permanently in the clouds into a sensible and mature woman. I didn't like Isabel much at all, though I'm not really sure if I was supposed to. Throughout most of the book she was just so silly and immature - wishing that she would catch a terrible illness or some other tragedy would befall her, just so she could have some excitement in her life - although as several of the other characters pointed out, she wasn't a bad person, just childish and foolish. It was sad that her own romantic notions and ideals were preventing her from having any chance of happiness.
I thought some of the minor characters were much more interesting and I would have liked them to have played a bigger part in the story. I particularly loved Sigismund Smith, who was a friend of both George and Isabel, and a 'sensation author' - probably a parody of Mary Elizabeth Braddon herself. Sigismund (whose real name is Sam) is a writer of 'penny numbers' - cheap, serialised adventure stories. His enthusiasm for his work and his unusual methods of researching his novels provide most of the humour in the book.
Due to Isabel's reading, almost every page contains allusions to characters and events from various novels, plays and poems - most of which I haven't read - so I found myself constantly having to turn to the notes at the back of the book (until I decided I could follow the story well enough without understanding all the references to Edith Dombey and Ernest Maltravers).
Overall, this was another great book from Mary Elizabeth Braddon, although not quite what I was expecting.
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A good Victorian read
Tried this on spec because other reviewers recommended it (and it was free). I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Read more
Published 17 days ago by Yorkshire Lass in Exile
Riverting!
I couldn't put this down. Compelling and charming and totally believable. The true feelings of somone in a forbidden love.
Published 2 months ago by Mrs. V. Rowe
better than bovary indeed....too good!! prepare for all night reading
i love love this book, it is totally gripping and the better each time i read it. It concerns a silly girl really, though you can't help but love and feel for her and her... Read more
Published on 2 Aug 2008 by blondie08
A Brilliant Read
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. Read more
Published on 15 Jun 2004 by Saliero
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