num_pages: 464
description: When The Doctor's Wife was first published in 1864, Mary Elizabeth Braddon was well known for her scandalous bestseller, Lady Audley's Secret. Adultery, death, and the spectacle of female recrimination and suffering are the elements that combine to make The Doctor's Wife a classic women's 'sensation' novel. Yet it is also Braddon's most self-consciously literary work and her rewriting of Madame Bovary. Like Emma Bovary, Braddon's heroine, Isabel Gilbert, is trapped in a marriage to a man incapable of understanding her imaginative life. But Braddon's novel differs vastly from Flaubert's in the nature and consequences of Isabel's 'affair'.
language: English
title: The Doctor's Wife
titlecomplete: The Doctor's Wife
characters: Isabel Sleaford, George Gilbert
genres: Historical Fiction, Historical, Novels, Gothic, Victorian, English Literature, Classics, British Literature, Fiction, 19th Century
ratings_count: 1668
publisher: Oxford University Press