Baudelaire writes about Madame Bovary: “this work, the secret chamber of his thought, remains naturally the most interesting for poets and philosophers...” Marcel Proust believed that Flaubert in Madame Bovary finds the form that is perhaps the newest ever encountered in French literature. And Borges stated that “no creature of Flaubert is as real as Flaubert himself”. There are many who argue that his main work is his Correspondence, because there the man, the author, the essence of his work, the very face of his fate is beautifully captured.

Madame Bovary represents the turning point in the evolutionary path from autobiography to the novel. Flaubert's famous phrase is well known: “Madame Bovary is me!” As early as 1837, he wrote a short sharp story titled Passion and Virtue, whose heroine, the Madja, poisons her husband and children for the sake of a lover who drives her away and pushes her to suicide, resembled Emma Bovary. Eugène Delamare, a doctor in Normandy, died of grief because his wife Delphine cheated on him and destroyed him.

This true story was not the only source of inspiration for writing Madame Bovary. Flaubert had in mind a manuscript known by the title Memoirs of Madame Ludovica, which was later discovered in 1946 in the library of Rouen.