Many people among them Henry James) have considered Balzac to be the greatest of all novelists. Eugenie 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.

Translated By Ellen Marriage With An Introduction By Fredric R. Jameson

Fredric R. Jameson is William A. Lane, Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University in North Carolina. His publications include Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Signatures of the Visible, and Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, with Aesthetics of the Geopolitical forthcoming.