The Two Young Brides (Memoires De Deux Jeunes Mariees)

New York, NY: P. F. Collier & Son. Very Good with no dust jacket. 1902. Reprint edition. Hardcover. Very Good: shows indications of careful use: moderate wear to the extremities, several small, faint coffee-like stains to the front panel of the lime-green cloth over boards; an attractive but personalized bookplate at the front pastedown endpaper, which also shows a former owner's gift inscription above it; the binding is square and secure; the text is clean. Free of creased or dog-eared pages in the text. Free of underlining, hi-lighting, notations, or marginalia. A handsome copy, structurally sound and tightly bound, showing moderate wear and the noted flaws. NOT a Remainder, Book-Club, or Ex-Library. 8vo. (8.25 x 5.75 X 1.1 inches) . Translated by The Lady Mary Loyd. Critical Introduction by Henry James. Illustrated an attractive frontispiece portrait of the author and a section of numerous portrait at the rear of the book with descriptive notes by Octave Uzanne. Language: English. Weight: 1 pound, 22 ounces. Hardback: No DJ 'as issued'. Honoré de Balzac (1799 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James. The third book of Balzac's La Comédie Humaine, Letters of Two Brides is an epistolary tale told in the letters between two young women after leaving their convent. The correspondence between the two women details their diverging attitude and philosophies towards marriage and love, with one seeking passion and romance, and the other devoting herself to selfless familial servitude. This is the third story in the Scenes From a Private Life section of La Comédie Humaine, and, like the previous two, focuses on women seeking happiness in love and marriage. While these stories have the flavor of a morality play, Balzac doesn't feel to the reader as if he is preaching a specific virtue or moral as much as he is characterizing how life often plays out in spite of our best laid plans, and how obtaining happiness can be more complicated than most perceive. ; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; xliii, 368 pp. pages .