I n Frantumaglia , her collection of essays on writing and reading, Elena Ferrante writes that she has sometimes dismissed Gustave Flaubert as a “misogynist”, angered by his invention of as callous a mother as Emma Bovary. In other moods, however, she has wondered whether Flaubert allows his female characters to say what “women truly think and say and live but do not dare write”.

Ferrante’s ambivalence is, I think, the most fitting feminist response to Flaubert’s novel. It’s tempting to castigate him as a male writer who kills his female character because he can’t imagine any other end for a transgressive woman; to reproach him for not giving Emma Bovary the profundity of emotion with which Tolstoy imbues Anna Karenina.…