"The Doctor's Wife" is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's rewriting of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary". She explores her heroine's sense of entrapment and alienation in middle-class provincial life, married to a good natured but bovine husband who seems incapable of understanding his wife's imaginative life and feelings. A woman with a secret, adultery, death and the spectacle of female recrimination and suffering are the elements which combine to make "The Doctor's Wife" a classic women's sensation novel. Yet it is also a self-consciously literary novel, in which Braddon seeks to transcend the sensation genre.