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  • Published: 16 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9780307798640
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Eugenie Grandet





CHOSEN BY ROSE TREMAIN AS HER ORANGE INHERITANCE - Vintage Classics has partnered with The Orange Prize for Fiction to ask six recipients of the Prize which book they would pass onto the next generation.

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.

  • Published: 16 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9780307798640
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Other books in the series

Emma
Persuasion
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

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