The Doctor's Wife

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 019954980X
• ISBN13: 9780199549801
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.0" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

Isn't life like a novel in 3 volumes?

The Doctor's Wife is the 4th of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels which I have had the good fortune to read. There are 76 more, so, Oxford World's Classics, bring them on! In this, my favorite so far, the heroine reads novels and dreams of her life being like those heroines in her novels. She especially seems to have an affinity with Edith Dombey. Isabel marries a decent, honest, but not much of a dreamer type man. He is very sensible and loves her much, but doesn't satisfy her emotionally, while someone else does. Braddon's wonderful word paintings of the nature scenes, and her many literary allusions were what brought this book to be my favorite of hers so far. And I thought the story was also a little more interesting. I highly recommend this author to anyone who reads 19th century literature for FUN, which is why I do it.