Eugenie Grandet

by Honore de Balzac

Overview

Saumur, the setting for Eugenie Grandet (1833), one of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac's great Comedie humaine. The Grandet household, oppressed by the exacting miserliness of Grandet himself, is jerked violently out of routine by the sudden arrival of Eugenie's cousin Charles, recently orphaned and penniless. Eugenie's emotional awakening, stimulated by her love for her cousin, brings her into direct conflict with her father, whose cunning and financial success are matched against her determination to rebel. Eugenie's moving story is set against the backdrop of provincial oppression, the vicissitudes of the wine trade, and the workings of the financial system in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It is both a poignant portrayal of private life and a vigorous fictional document of its age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783734084072
Publisher:	Outlook Verlag
Publication date:	09/28/2019
Pages:	170
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Regarded as one of the key figures of French and European literature, Balzac’s realist approach to writing would influence Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Karl Marx. With a precocious attitude and fierce intellect, Balzac struggled first in school and then in business before dedicating himself to the pursuit of writing as both an art and a profession. His distinctly industrious work routine—he spent hours each day writing furiously by hand and made extensive edits during the publication process—led to a prodigious output of dozens of novels, stories, plays, and novellas. La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s most famous work, is a sequence of 91 finished and 46 unfinished stories, novels, and essays with which he attempted to realistically and exhaustively portray every aspect of French society during the early-nineteenth century.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	vii
	Note on the Text	xxx
	Select Bibliography	xxxi
	A Chronology of Honore de Balzac	xxxii
	Portraits of Bourgeois	3
	The Cousin from Paris	35
	Provincial Love	54
	A Miser's Promises and Lovers' Vows	90
	Family Sorrows	134
	The Way of the World	169
	Explanatory Notes	193

Editorial Reviews

Balzac's 1834 King Lear-esque novel here gets a little fresh air breathed into it by Burton Raffel, who won the 1991 French-American Translation Prize.

Library Journal

"This brilliant but devastatingly sad novel moved me so much, I began it again the moment I got to the end."  —Rose Tremain

From the Publisher