In October 2026 Penguin Classics will publish the sixth major English translation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary in a century. The translator is the British academic Helen Beecham, who teaches nineteenth-century French at University College London and has spent eleven years on the book.
The previous five English versions still in print are Eleanor Marx Aveling's 1886, Francis Steegmuller's 1957, Geoffrey Wall's 1992 (revised 2003), Lydia Davis's 2010, and Adam Thorpe's 2011. Beecham's preface, which Penguin sent to reviewers in February, calls all five of them "good books that are no longer the book we need."
The question is whether she is right.
Retranslation has become, in the English-language publishing economy, a particular kind of project. Publishers commission new versions of classics roughly every twenty to thirty years. The official reason is that translations age. The unofficial reason is that translations are copyrighted to the translator's estate, and publishers prefer to own the new one outright.
Both reasons are real.
Translations do age. Aveling's Bovary, which she completed in the year of her father's death and her own descent into depression, is a Victorian novel about a French provincial. Its English is the English of George Eliot's late period. It is beautiful. It is also, in places where Flaubert's modernism is most visible, deaf to the original.
Steegmuller's 1957 version was an answer to Aveling. He cut the Victorian decoration. His Charles Bovary speaks plainly. His Emma is more recognisably a woman in trouble. The translation was the standard American version for nearly fifty years and is still taught at several universities.
Geoffrey Wall, who succeeded Steegmuller as the standard British translation, kept more of Flaubert's irony and less of Steegmuller's American flatness. Wall's revision in 2003 sharpened the sentences further. It is the version most contemporary readers under fifty will have encountered.
Lydia Davis's 2010 translation was the event of the decade in the field. Davis is one of the great living English prose writers, and she translated Flaubert as a Davis would: short sentences, terrible patience, a refusal to smooth. Her version is shocking in places. It is also, some critics have argued, too obviously Davis.
Adam Thorpe's 2011, which appeared in the United Kingdom a year after Davis in the United States, took the opposite tack. Thorpe is a novelist with a deep nineteenth-century sensibility. His Flaubert is fluent, period-specific, and unembarrassed by its own beauty.
Five translations, five Flauberts, all still in print and all still selling.
What does Beecham's sixth offer that the previous five do not?
Her preface argues that the existing English versions, including Davis's, have systematically underread the novel's irony toward Emma. Flaubert's free indirect style, which the English language has never had a comfortable solution for, slips in and out of Emma's consciousness in ways the earlier translations stabilise.
Beecham's version tries to keep the slippage. Sentences float. The reader is, at moments, uncertain whose thought she is reading. Beecham believes this is closer to what Flaubert wrote and to what made the novel a scandal in 1857.
On a sample passage sent to reviewers, the famous scene in the cab at Rouen, Beecham's version is more clinical than Davis's and more anatomical than Wall's. It is also, on the page, less obviously beautiful. The cab moves through the city as a kind of mechanism, and Emma inside it is something the mechanism is doing.
Whether this is the Bovary the present moment needs is not for the reviewer to decide in February. The question will be tested over years, in classrooms, in book clubs, in the slow accumulation of which translation reviewers reach for when they quote.
Davis's version, fifteen years on, is still gaining ground in American universities. Wall's is still the British default. Aveling's is still in print and still sells about 1,800 copies a year, which says something about the survival of even the most dated translations.
Steegmuller's, alone of the five, has begun to slip. The University of Chicago press edition that kept him in circulation has not been reprinted since 2018, and a copy on the used market now costs more than a new Beecham will.
The sixth Bovary arrives in October at twenty-three pounds. The five earlier ones, taken together, are available second-hand for less than the price of a sandwich.
What the new translation will offer, if it offers anything, is a particular reader's particular Flaubert at a particular moment. That is what every translation offers. The reader chooses, and the translation, if it is honest, makes the choosing worth doing.