Book description
Poor, plain spinster Bette is compelled to survive on the condescending
patronage of her socially superior relatives in Paris: her beautiful,
saintly cousin Adeline, the philandering Baron Hulot and their daughter
Hortense. Already deeply resentful of their wealth, when Bette learns
that the man she is in love with plans to marry Hortense, she becomes
consumed by the desire to exact her revenge and dedicates herself to the
destruction of the Hulot family, plotting their ruin with patient,
silent malice. Cousin Bette is a gripping tale of violent jealousy,
sexual passion and treachery, and a brilliant portrayal of the grasping,
bourgeois society of 1840s Paris. The culmination of the Com die
humaine, Balzac's epic chronicle of his times, it is one of his greatest
triumphs as a novelist.
Honore de Balzac was born in Tours in 1799 to a bourgeouis family.
His first success with writing came with the publication of Les
Chouans in 1829 which was followed by a vast collection of novels and
short stories of which Cousin Bette, first published in 1847, is one
of the chief novels. He died in 1850 only a few months after his
marriage to the Polish countess Evelina Hanska, with whom he had
conducted a romantic correspondence for 18 years.
Marion Crawford translated two other titles for Penguin; Old Goriot
and Eugenie Grandet before her death in 1973.
