Madame Bovary.: Provincial Manners. Translation from the French Édition définitive by Eleanor Marx-Aveling.

London: Vizetelly & Co.,, 1886. A lovely copy in the original cloth First edition in English of Flaubert's masterpiece, in the attractively decorated cloth, one of the most notable books in the sequence of English translations of French and Russian novels published by Henry Vizetelly in this decade. The translator was Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor, then living openly with Edward Bibbens Aveling, a married man whose name she used in conjunction with her own. First published in the magazine La Revue de Paris in 1856, Madame Bovary was immediately sued for "outrage aux bonnes moeurs" ("affront to public decency"). Flaubert appeared before the court on 7 February 1857, but was found not not guilty and publication resumed. The ensuing publicity also ensured that upon publication the book became a bestseller. The heroine of the novel, Emma Bovary, ultimately commits suicide by swallowing arsenic - a fate which also befell her translator, Eleanor Marx-Aveling. Madame Bovary is now acknowledged as one of the greatest novels in the Western canon. The publisher, Henry Richard Vizetelly (1820–1894), specialised in translations of French and Russian novels: "Many of them affronted Victorian notions of propriety... It was above all his publication, between 1884 and 1888, of translations of seventeen novels by Emile Zola that brought him notoriety for the first time in his life and turned him into a reluctant martyr, one of the early heroes of the fight against oppressive literary censorship" (ODNB). Octavo. Original blue-green diagonal-ribbed cloth, spine lettered and decorated in gilt, title in gilt on blue ground and gilt floral decoration to front cover, rear cover ruled in blind with publisher's device blind-stamped at centre, black coated endpapers. With tissue guarded frontispiece and 5 plates from etchings by Daniel Mordant after Albert Fourié; advertisement leaf at front. Bookplate to front pastedown of Edward Sprague Marsh (1857-1939) lawyer active in Brandon, Vermont, rare book collector and editor, engraved by William Fowler Hopson; 20th-century bookplate to front free endpaper of one William West, based on the title page of Robert Ross's Aubrey Beardsley (1909); pencil inscription "ex libris BJB - JB Buckingham Sr" to verso of last leaf. Spine toned and leaning, creasing to spine ends, a touch of wear to extremities, a few light marks to covers, inner hinges split, book block remaining firm, contents mildly toned, light ink stain to two leaves, otherwise fresh and clean throughout. An attractive copy.