Perhaps no book in the history of the novel has been more read and praised by critics than this story of Emma Bovary, a provincial French woman who could not bear the discrepancy between her romantic dreams and the dull routine of her daily life and marriage to a middle-class country doctor. For Flaubert, however, the actual writing was as important as the story he had to tell, and he spent five years crafting the novel, laboring over each word and phrase. This attention to detail and accuracy is reflected in the relevation of the unconscious mind at work as Madame Bovary attempts to impost on her humdrum life the substance of the dreams that ultimately bring about her dissolution.