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. 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. Here Grandet embodies both the passionate pursuit of money, and the human cost of avarice. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely, he will let no one near them.īut 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.Įugenie 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.

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.

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.Ĭrawford in Penguin Classics.

Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac