Where most 19th-century novels had been concerned merely to present plainly likeable stories that ended in a marriage, Madame Bovary navigated unknown territory by beginning with one. Charles Bovary, a good-hearted but dull and boorish doctor with a meagre practice, marries Emma, a beautiful farm girl raised in a convent. Although she anticipates a life of adventurous marriage, her only excitement soon derives from the sentimental flights of fancy she gleans from the novels she reads. She grows increasingly bored and unhappy with her middle-class existence, and after the birth of their first child, she feels that her life is over.