Here's what one reviewer said about Madame Bovary:
Madame Bovary is a stand-out novel more for how and when it was written than for any virtues imbedded within the text. What was novel writing before Flaubert? Actually, it was very much like the flowery novels that Emma feeds on--Victorian in the high-flown ideals of romantic love and perhaps not too far off from the Harlequin Romances of today's marketplace, but without the sexual innuendo.
Flaubert wrote perhaps the first novel that frankly discusses a married woman's disenchantment, and while he is not a sympathetic author, his landmark novel was part of a movement that changed the way writers write about their characters. For that reason alone it is worth the read--it must have been a breath of fresh air in a marketplace full of novels that featured limpid-eyed damsels and sensitive, altruistic and well-dressed heroes.
This is also a surprisingly modern cautionary tale about the dangers of getting in over one's head monetarily--Emma's dramatic fall from financial grace is not that far off from stories that are so common they don't even make today's newspapers.
Read Madame Bovary for the story alone, and you will have read only a story of one woman's tragic life. Read it with an eye towards its place in the history of novel writing, and you will come away with something to mull over and compare with any other book you read that features a strong-minded female.
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