Book description
THIS ORANGE INHERITANCE EDITION OF Eugénie Grandet IS
PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION
Books shape our lives and transform the way we see ourselves and
each other. The best books are timeless and continue to be relevant
generation after generation. Vintage Classics asked the winners of The
Orange Prize for Fiction which books they would pass onto the next
generation and why. Rose Tremain chose Eugénie Grandet.
Monsieur Grandet is a very rich man whose chief care is his
gold. He runs his household with exacting miserly attention and his
wife and daughter suffer a Spartan existence. On the evening of his
daughter Eugénie's twenty third birthday his foppish nephew Charles
suddenly arrives from Paris. Eugénie has never known passion. Now, in
an instant, she falls in love and her life is changed forever.
Monsieur Grandet will not countenance his daughter's marriage to her
penniless cousin and Eugénie's determination to follow her heart
leads her into direct conflict with her father.
'This brilliant but devastatingly sad novel moved me so much, I
began it again the moment I got to the end' Rose Tremain.
Honoré de Balzac was born 20 May 1799, the second son of a civil
servant. He was brought up away from his family home, first in the
care of a wet-nurse and then at a strict grammar school at Vendôme.
Balzac then studied at the Sorbonne, before entering training to
become a lawyer, like his father. At the age of twenty, to the
consternation of his family, he announced his intention to abandon law
and become a writer. His early literary works met with little success,
and Balzac's various business ventures as a printer and publisher also
foundered. In 1829, he began to conceive a grand design for a series
of novels comprehensively portraying French society in the eighteenth
century. Balzac's Comédie humaine became his life's work,
comprising 91 separate works depicting private and public life in the
town and country, in politics and the military. Masterpieces of the
Comédie humaine include Eugénie Grandet, Père
Goirot, The Wild Ass's Skin and The Black Sheep.
Many of his novels were critically acclaimed on publication, and went
on to profoundly influence authors from Marcel Proust and Gustave
Flaubert to Charles Dickens and Henry James. At the age of fifty-one,
Balzac was finally able to marry the recently widowed Evelina Hanska,
whom he had loved for eighteen years. But by this time he was in very
poor health and Balzac died only five months after his wedding, on 18
August 1850.
Rose Tremain's bestselling novels have won many awards, including
the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Whitbread Novel of the
Year (Music and Silence), the James Tait Black Memorial
Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger (Sacred Country).
Restoration, the first of her novels to feature Robert Merivel,
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989 and made into a film in
1995. Her short story, 'Moth', was also filmed (as the award-winning
Ricky) by François Ozon in 2009. Her novel, Trespass,
was a Richard and Judy Bookclub Choice. Rose Tremain was made a CBE in
2007. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.
