Coo-coo-ca-choo Mrs. Robinson

JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN was a Cambridge-educated barrister who supplemented his earnings with journalism, and in 1857 he took on a review of a new French novel. No English translation of Madame Bovary would appear until 1886, but Stephen was good in French and the book was already notorious, in part because Flaubert and his publishers had been indicted for obscenity—a rap they beat after a one-day trial. Stephen told the readers of the Saturday Review that he found the novel repellent, yet while it had passages “no English author of reputation” would have published, he was not troubled by its frankness as such. What he objected to was Flaubert’s refusal to suggest that Emma’s adultery was wrong in itself, and not simply because of its consequences.