Gemma Bovery is a graphic novel written by British author Posy Simmonds in 1999. The author is a children’s books illustrator as well as a newspaper cartoonist and writer. She was born in England in 1945, studied French at La Sorbonne in 1962 and then attended the Central School of Art and Design in London. She soon started her career as an illustrator for The Sun, The Times and Cosmopolitan. In 1972 she moved to The Guardian where she began drawing a weekly comic strip The Silent Three in 1977. In 1981 she was named cartoonist of the year in the British Press Awards. The Guardian offered her to serialise Gemma Bovery in their columns in the late 1990s.
Her novel gently satirises the British middle-class who are her readers. The author, who has been influenced by her French studies, rethinks the doomed heroine of Gustave Flaubert and transposes her in our time. An intellectual baker, who is a fan of Madame Bovary, is also the witness of Gemma’s fate; he is the one who assumes that there is no possible coincidence between his beautiful British neighbour and Flaubert’s heroine Emma, he feels responsible for Gemma’s fate as if he had cast a spell on her.
In this novel Posy Simmonds portrays authentic yet stereotyped characters either British or French as the novel’s setting is Normandy in France which is of course a similarity with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The British expatriates are mocked in a rather critical and humorous way, for instance they don’t like meeting French people but prefer to invite their British friends instead, they bring their own food to France and they don’t pay attention to their physical appearance.
The novel Gemma Bovery was adapted to the cinema, directed by Anne Fontaine starring Gemma Aterton, Jason Flemying and Fabrice Luchini (as Joubert). The novel, like the film, is a comedy-drama seen through Joubert’s point of view. Among Posy Simmonds’s other novels, Tamara Drewe was also adapted to the cinema in 2010 starring Gemma Aterton as well and directed by Stephen Frears.
To serialise : adapter en feuilleton
Doomed : destiné à, condamné à
Fate : le destin
To cast a spell : jeter un sort
