Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are famous female characters from the pen of two celebrated male 19th century writers, Gustave Flaubert and Leo Tolstoy. The two fictional women have much in common and illustrate the difficulty of women in Europe of that era. Both books offer social commentary on their respective societies, one, a rapidly developing Second Empire France; the other, a reforming Tsarist Russia. Overall, the authors are…