Description

Eugénie Grandet (1833) is a novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Written as Balzac began to formulate the grand scale of his La Comédie humaine sequence, Eugénie Grandet was eventually tied into the universe of his epic realist masterpiece, a holistic vision of nineteenth-century French society which sought to observe the consequences of the political, religious, and economic shifts of the Revolution and in its aftermath. This novel looks to the moral failings of a particular nouveau riche family, whose accumulation of wealth has quickly erased any sense of their working-class origins.

After the Revolution, master cooper Felix Grandet married the daughter of a successful merchant, ascended in the political and social life of the town of Saumur, and quietly amassed an immense wealth through industry and inheritances from his wife’s family. Now an old man, Felix possesses a fortune he feels no inclination to use, not even to improve the daily lives of his ailing wife and young adult daughter Eugénie, who faces frequent incursions from local suitors intent on marrying her to attain her father’s wealth. When Felix’s nephew Charles arrives from Paris with a letter from the patriarch’s estranged brother Guillaume, tragic circumstances force him to choose between habitual greed and the immense pressure of performing what for anyone else would be a basic act of generosity. Eugénie Grandet is a powerful story of fortune, power, and the ease with which these lead to moral failure.

Published at the dawning of Balzac’s most productive and critically-acclaimed period, this novel is not only a good introduction to his lengthy La Comédie humaine sequence, but an irreplaceable work of nineteenth-century realist literature.

This edition of Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet is a classic of French literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Description

This classic work of social satire, carnal desire, greed, and obsession is both an exquisitely drawn portrayal of private life and an extraordinary document of post-revolutionary France. Many people (among them Henry James) have considered Honoré de Balzac to be the greatest of all novelists. Eugénie Grandet, his spare, classical story of a girl whose life is blighted by her father’s hysterical greed, goes a long way to justifying that opinion. One of the most magnificent of his tales of early nineteenth-century French provincial life, this novel is the work of a writer on whom nothing was lost, and who represents most fully the ability of the human animal to understand and illuminate its own condition.   In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur, the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter, Eugénie, 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 Eugénie’s own desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all.

Description

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.