Davis’ translation of Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways (2010) is her most recent translation from French and one that was written in her maturity. The perception of translation as a form of training for writing, which I discussed in the Introduction, seems least applicable here: at the point of writing her translation of Madame Bovary, Davis had already been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and had already published six collections of short stories, four of which were with major presses, and her novel. By the time the translation was published in 2010, Davis’ Collected Stories was also in print. It is safe to say that at this point she was an established writer.

Yet she chose to continue translating. The hierarchy of writing and translation, where the former is seen as more valuable, is always questioned by Davis’ work, but here it seems most problematic. As with her other, later translations, Davis was working on stylistically complex writing.Where Leiris and Proust may be less commonly read, even if Proust is well known, Flaubert's Madame Bovary is popular and regarded as ‘an important landmark in the history of the novel’ (Davis 2011b: 66). Indeed, in her introduction to the text, Davis argues that ‘Madame Bovary permanently changed the way novels were written thereafter’ (2011a: xi). Davis (2011b: 67) found eighteen different previous translations of it, suggesting that it had been popular since its first translation by Mary Neal Sherwood (published in 1881). The narrative of Madame Bovary is itself banal: a young woman marries a country doctor and dreams of a more exciting life. She reads magazines and novels by Eugene Sue, Balzac and Georges Sand to inform herself about Paris (Flaubert 2001: 111; Flaubert 2011a: 49–50). She conducts affairs first with Rodolphe, then with Léon. Neither affair really satisfies her craving for a more exciting life. Her inability to deal with financial matters leads to her owing 8,000 francs to Monsieur Lheureux and the bailiffs coming to sell off the Bovarys’ possessions. Emma commits suicide by taking arsenic. Her husband is left destitute and dies soon afterward, leaving their daughter Berthe to be looked after by a poor aunt who sends her to work in a cotton mill.