Eugenie Grandet

<p>Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions Honor&#233; de Balzac's <i>Eug&#233;nie Grandet</i> is translated with an introduction by M.A. Crawford in Penguin Classics.<br><br>In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter Eug&#233;nie 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 Eug&#233;nie's own desires her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all. <i>Eug&#233;nie Grandet</i> is one of the earliest and finest works in Balzac's <i>Com&#233;die humaine</i> 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.<br><br>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.<br><br>Honor&#233; 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 <i>La Com&#233;die humaine</i> 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 &#201;mile Zola Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe.<br><br>If you enjoyed <i>Eugenie Grandet </i>you might like Moli&#232;re's <i>The Miser and Other Plays</i> also available in Penguin Classics.</p>