Overview

Eugnie Grandet (1833) is a novel by French author Honor de Balzac. Written as Balzac began to formulate the grand scale of his La Comdie humaine sequence, Eugnie 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 Eugnie, 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. Eugnie 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 Comdie humaine sequence, but an irreplaceable work of nineteenth-century realist literature. This edition of Honor de Balzac's Eugnie 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.

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9781513268279

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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.

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