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The nineteenth-century French literary critic Sainte-Beuve once accused Honoré de Balzac of, as Peter Brooks writes in the Review’s January 16 issue, “a kind of unhealthy success with his female readership,” faulting the novelist for knowing “many things about women, their emotional and sensual feelings.” This was supposed to be a criticism (Balzac, for his part, found Sainte-Beuve “too puritanical,” and allegedly threatened to run him through “with his pen”), but, as Brooks observes, it was Balzac’s interest in—and understanding of—women’s feelings about romance that made his work vibrate “with a kind of intense emotion.”

Below, alongside Brooks’s article, we have collected five essays from our archives about M. Balzac.

Peter Brooks
Passion’s Countervoices

Balzac’s The Lily in the Valley gives full-throated voice to romantic passion and at the same time contains it, inflating its rhetoric while ironizing it.

Victoria Baena
Altars of Novelty and Profit

Xavier Giannoli’s new adaptation of Balzac’s Lost Illusionsfollows an aspiring poet in post-Revolutionary Paris and his precarious alliance with an unruly press.

—June 16, 2022

Morris Dickstein
Balzac’s Novel of Female Friendship

Balzac’s The Memoirs of Two Young Wives is as much a dialectical as an epistolary novel, built on the contrasts and binaries embodied in the two women’s unfolding lives, for all their nourishing friendship.

—January 9, 2018

Edmund White
A Hungry Little Boy

“Pears had a special appeal for Balzac; he often kept bushels of them at home and could eat as many as forty or fifty in a day (one February he had 1,500 pears in his cellar).”

—January 12, 2012

Simon Leys
Balzac’s Genius & Other Paradoxes

“Balzac’s claim to the title of Greatest French Novelist of All Time can hardly be disputed: he simply bulldozed his way into that unique position, propelled by the sheer mass and energy of his production. The total cast of his Comédie humaine amounts to some 3,500 characters (including a few animals)—in all of Western literature, only Shakespeare and Dickens approached such a bewildering fecundity.”

—January 12, 1995

John Bayley
Balzac Possessed

“From then on the pattern was set: an immense and increasing load of debt arising from extravagance and speculation—Balzac only had to touch a stock for the bottom to drop out of the market—against which were mortgaged the plans and profits of novel after novel. He turned his hopes and disasters into fiction as he lived through them”

—October 4, 1973

V. S. Pritchett
Balzac the Great

“Balzac was forever pushing into his own future. He scarcely lives in the present, except in his impatient shouts for money, his rows with his mother, and his pressing demands for love to keep him going. His opinions of work just done are as wild as his descriptions of work not done yet. Having just finished Le Médicin de campagne he tells Mme. Hanska the book is ‘wholly evangelical in its nature and seems to be like a romanticized Imitation of Christ.’ Admirable nonsense!”

—July 28, 1966

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