Therese Desqueyroux, Francois Mauriac's stark and introspective 1927 novel, appears to be quite a different tale from Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert's succes de scandale published exactly seventy years earlier. Yet upon closer scrutiny, the two novels' similarities become undeniable. The preponderance of parallelisms surely cannot be attributed to happenstance, nor can one agree with the contention that Mauriac must have been inspired, unconsciously and unbeknownst to him, by the literary model of Madame Bovary. Textual Hauntings opens with an overview of the strikingly similar plot,...