Balzac began his career as a novelist with pseudonymously published historical novels in imitation of >> Sir Walter Scott but, as he turned to fiction with a contemporary setting, he gradually evolved a grandly ambitious plan to write a series of novels which would provide a panoramic portrait of French society in the first half of the 19th century. La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy), as he entitled the whole project, was never finished but, even so, it runs to more than 90 individual but interconnected works of fiction which together include thousands of characters. Eugénie Grandet, one of the earliest novels in the series, is set in the stifling household of Monsieur Grandet, a wealthy but miserly wine merchant in the French provincial town of Saumur. Grandet controls the life of his submissive and naïve daughter, Eugénie, whom he plans to marry off to his advantage rather than hers; she, however, falls in love with her penniless cousin Charles. But Charles proves as worthless a man as her father. Despatched to the West Indies to make his fortune, he soon forgets his promises to Eugénie and when he returns, rich from dealings in the slave trade, he chooses to marry for social position rather than love. 

Eugénie’s hopes for emotional fulfilment have been ruined by the greed of both her father and her one-time suitor. Balzac’s huge cycle of novels contains many other brilliant depictions of everyday tragedies like Eugénie’s. Old Goriot, for example, tells the Lear-like story of an old man living in a down-at-heel Parisian boarding house who sacrifices his all for his two married daughters. In return they treat him with contempt and offhand neglect. However, none of Balzac’s books possesses quite the power to touch and move the reader as Eugénie Grandet, with its tale of blighted love and the baleful power of money.

Jane Austen began writing Pride and Prejudice, then entitled First Impressions, when she was in her early twenties but it was rejected by a publisher and only finally appeared, in a much revised form and under a new title, in 1813. 

The book focuses on the Bennet family of mother, father and five nubile daughters, thrown into confusion by the arrival of two rich and unattached young men in the neighbourhood. Charles Bingley leases Netherfield, a house close to the Bennet residence and stays there together with his friend Fitzwilliam Darcy. During visits exchanged between the two houses, Bingley falls in love with the eldest Bennet daughter, Jane, while Darcy and Elizabeth, the second eldest, circle one another warily. Witty, clever and ironic, Elizabeth is intrigued by Darcy but dislikes his apparent coldness and arrogance and is prejudiced against him by stories she hears from others. At different times throughout the novel, misunderstandings, social snobbery and self-will conspire to keep both Jane and Bingley and Darcy and Elizabeth apart. But true love finally triumphs. A supporting cast of characters, often richly comic, orbits the central figures of Darcy and Elizabeth. The ill-matched relationship between the ironic, detached Mr Bennet and his gushing, silly wife is beautifully observed. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is a splendidly self-satisfied and snobbish representative of everything that is bad about the aristocracy. Mr Collins, the clergyman and toady to Lady Catherine, unwittingly reveals himself in his true colours during the memorable scene in which he proposes marriage to Elizabeth.

Pride and Prejudice has long been Jane Austen’s most popular novel and, with its clear-eyed portrait of the ways in which society’s conventions dictate the shifting patterns of the relationships between the men and women in it, it is one of the greatest comedies of social manners in English literature.

Film versions: Pride and Prejudice (starring Greer Garson as Elizabeth and Laurence Olivier as Darcy,1940); Pride and Prejudice (Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth, Colin Firth as Darcy, 1995, TV); Pride and Prejudice (Keira Knightley as Elizabeth, Mathew Macfadyen as Darcy, 2005)

Read on
Sense and Sensibility
>> Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters; Alison Lurie, Only Children; Emma Tennant, Pemberley (a sequel, published in 1993); Joanna Trollope, Other People’s Children; Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice
on First Reading Jane Austen

Young, well-off and spoiled, Emma Woodhouse is complacently convinced that she knows what is best for everyone, particularly in matters of the heart. Her matchmaking skills are largely directed towards her young, amiable and innocent protegée Harriet Smith, whom Emma decides would be ideally matched with the clergyman, Mr Elton. 

Elton, however, has other ideas and, despising Harriet for her lack of social status, he has his eye on Emma herself. Emma plays with the idea of being in love with Frank Churchill, recently arrived as a visitor in her village, but her real, unrecognized feelings are for the sympathetic and warm-hearted local squire, George Knightley who watches her attempts to shape other people’s lives with a mixture of affection and irritation.

As Emma’s assorted schemes collapse in embarrassment and, occasionally, distress, she is forced to acknowledge that she knows less about herself and about other people than she once believed she did.
‘Three or four families in a country village,’ Jane Austen wrote in a letter to one of her relatives, ‘is the very thing to work on.’ It was the world which she knew intimately herself. Born in a Hampshire village where her father was rector, she spent most of her life in the midst of her family either there or at Chawton, another village in Hampshire, or at Bath. Although she had several suitors, she never married. She died of Addison’s disease in Winchester at the age of only 41. All this might suggest that, as a novelist, she worked on a restricted canvas. Emma, as much as any of her novels, shows that there is far more to Jane Austen than the image of a rural spinster implies. Her tough-minded realism about human motivation and self-deceit, about the manoeuvrings of the marriage market and the institution of the family give her works a sharpness and a truthfulness all their own.

Film versions: Emma (starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma, 1996); Clueless (a version of the story updated to 1990s Beverley Hills, 1995)

Read on
Mansfield Park; Persuasion
Joan Aiken, Mansfield Revisited; Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

The daughter of Bronson Alcott, a renowned American educationalist, Louisa May Alcott published more than two hundred books but is largely remembered for just one – Little Women. Following the fortunes of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, the daughters of an army chaplain in the American Civil War, the book records both the everyday pleasures and the trials and tribulations of their lives.