Eugénie Grandet

by Honore de Balzac

Published December 1914

Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honore de Balzac's Eugenie Grandet is translated with an introduction by M.A. Crawford in Penguin Classics.

In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur, the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter, Eugenie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely, he will let no one near them. But when the arrival of her handsome cousin, Charles, awakens Eugenie's own desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all. Eugenie Grandet is one of the earliest and finest works in Balzac's Comedie humaine cycle, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. Here Grandet embodies both the passionate pursuit of money, and the human cost of avarice.

M. A. Crawford's lucid translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the irony and psychological insight of Balzac's characterization, the role of fate in the novel, its setting and historical background.

Honore De Balzac (1799-1850) failed at being a lawyer, publisher, printer, businessman, critic and politician before, at the age of thirty, turning his hand to writing. His life's work, La Comedie humaine, is a series of ninety novels and short stories which offer a magnificent panorama of nineteenth-century life after the French Revolution. Balzac was an influence on innumerable writers who followed him, including Marcel Proust, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.

If you enjoyed Eugenie Grandet you might like Moliere's The Miser and Other Plays, also available in Penguin Classics.



Le Pere Goriot

by Honore de Balzac

Published 1 December 1960
This French realist novel contrasts the social progress of an impoverished but ambitious aristocrat with the tale of a father, whose obsessive love for his daughters leads to his personal and financial ruin.
This concise supplement to Honore De Balzac's Pere Goriot helps students understand the overall structure of the work, actions and motivations of the characters, and the social and cultural perspectives of the author.

Les paysans

by Honore de Balzac

Published 25 July 1975

Cousin Pons

by Honore de Balzac

Published 1 December 1962
Mild, harmless and ugly to behold, the impoverished Pons is an ageing musician whose brief fame has fallen to nothing. Living a placid Parisian life as a bachelor in a shared apartment with his friend Schmucke, he maintains only two passions: a devotion to fine dining in the company of wealthy but disdainful relatives, and a dedication to the collection of antiques. When these relatives become aware of the true value of his art collection, however, their sneering contempt for the parasitic Pons rapidly falls away as they struggle to obtain a piece of the weakening man's inheritance. Taking its place in the Human Comedy as a companion to Cousin Bette, the darkly humorous Cousin Pons is among of the last and greatest of Balzac's novels concerning French urban society: a cynical, pessimistic but never despairing consideration of human nature.

La cousine Bette

by Honore de Balzac

Published 1 May 1973

La femme de trente ans

by Honore de Balzac

Published 1 January 1978

Illusions Perdues

by Honore de Balzac

Published 1 May 1973

La Peau de Chagrin

by Honore de Balzac

Published 1 February 1978

La Rabouilleuse

by Honore de Balzac

Published 1 December 1960

Le Lys Dans La Vallee

by Honore de Balzac

Published 1 December 1965