Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) helped to establish the current form of the novel, and was one of the greatest and most prolific novelists and short story writers of all time. Nearly a hundred of his novels and short stories formed
La Comédie Humaine, in which some characters occur in several stories.
Katherine Prescott Wormeley (1830-1908) was English born and taken to the US as a child. She was a nurse in the Civil War, an author and an editor, and a translator of all of de Balzac's works.
Eugénie Grandet (1833) was one of the first novels Balzac published under his own name, and as part of
La Comédie Humaine. The second edition (1839) includes a dedication to Marie du Fresnay, his lover at the time, and mother of his only child. The story is one of the Scenes from Provincial Life, and tells of the life of a miserly cooper who becomes very rich, and the effects this has on his family and neighbours.
The text was taken from the University of Adelaide ebook library, and checked against the 1890 Roberts edition in the Internet Archive. I have replaced diacritics, used American English, and made changes to spelling and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.
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