Emma Bovary, the ill-fated protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s eponymous novel, struggled to live within the confines of provincial life. She grew up on a convent and thought marriage would be her entry into an existence more nuanced than the farm life she knew. Her husband was a respectable doctor and loved her, but she found him boring and filled her idle time reading romance novels that gave her the scintillating, sensual escape she was looking for. Marriage didn’t extinguish Emma’s taste for extravagance. Before long, she sought the kind of thrill she found in the erotic pages she burned through. She took two lovers, Léon and Rodolphe, both of whom ultimately rejected her. She racked up a bill during her exploits and became destitute, eventually committing suicide lest her private affairs be exposed, and her young daughter and husband humiliated. It’s a foreboding tale my traditionalist anti-novella father would have loved for my sister and I to read so he could wave his finger in our faces and say, “See! Look what happens!” But that …