As a literary medium, the graphic novel made a great leap — out of the genre trap of science fiction, where its readership was limited — with the publication of Art Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus.” Lately we’ve even seen it move beyond fiction into memoir, with Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” books about her childhood in Iran and life as an exile, and Spiegelman’s book last year, “In the Shadow of No Towers,” about his reactions to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack and its aftermath.

Now the British cartoonist and children’s book author Posy Simmonds has created a droll, sophisticated reimagining of a great non-graphic novel, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.”

Originally published as a comic strip in the Guardian, it’s the story of Gemma Tate, a London magazine illustrator who marries a man named Charlie Bovery and moves with him to a village in Normandy. Gemma and Charlie have just enough money to drop out of the corporate grind and style themselves as “creative,” but she soon grows bored with the aimlessness of their lives.

The narrator of “Gemma Bovery” is Raymond Joubert, another dropout from the rat race, an intellectual who has chosen a “simpler” life as an artisan — the village baker.

But being a very good baker is not enough to occupy his mind, for Joubert grows obsessed with Gemma — in part because her name and her evident marital frustration and boredom with provincial life remind him of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. And his obsession with this parallel between literature and life contributes to the calamity that overtakes Gemma and Charlie Bovery.

This is a savagely observant book, especially acute in its portrait of the smug, hedonistic upper-middle classes of Britain and France, who condescend to one another amid constant wine, food and lifestyle chat.

A graphic novel runs the risk of feeling like a storyboard for a movie, but Simmonds’ is more text-heavy than most, and the pencil-sharp precision with which she captures her characters in pictures is matched by the way she captures them in words.