Old Goriot (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

A$80 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books · No longer available

BALZAC, Honoré de (trans. Ellen Marriage; intro. François Mauriac; illus. René Ben Sussan). Old Goriot. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1993. Octavo. Full grey leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design, lettering and fore-edges. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. xv, 317 pp. Illustrations by René Ben Sussan throughout. "Notes from the Archives" pamphlet laid in. Collector's Library of Famous Editions. Originally published in serial form in La Revue de Paris , December 1834–February 1835; first book edition Paris: Werdet, 1835. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) published Père Goriot — known in English by Ellen Marriage's translation title Old Goriot — at the end of 1834 and immediately recognised it as the work in which his larger project had found its method. It was the first of his novels to reintroduce characters from earlier books in substantial roles, and this device — the retour des personnages — became the structural principle of La Comédie humaine , the vast, interconnected cycle of nearly one hundred novels and stories in which Balzac attempted to document the whole of French society under the Restoration and the July Monarchy. At his death in 1850 the cycle was incomplete; what exists nonetheless constitutes one of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of prose fiction. Père Goriot is set in Paris in 1819, in the Maison Vauquer — a dilapidated pension in the Latin Quarter whose inhabitants include Eu

• Binding: Hardcover

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