http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/197577246

Balzac : a biography

This is the first major English biography of Balzac for over fifty years. The living manifestation of the colourful and varied world he described, yet at the same time its most astonishing exception, Balzac is the perfect subject for biography. He was a relentless seducer whose successes were as spectacular as his catastrophes; a passionate collector, inventor, explorer and political campaigner; a mesmerizing story-teller with the power to make his fantasies come true. Graham Robb takes us through his early literary disappointments, his struggle against poverty, and the lurid commercial novels in which he learnt his trade. Robb shows how Balzac's craving for wealth, fame, and happiness produced a series of hare-brained entrepreneurial schemes which took him to the remotest parts of Europe, a love affair with a Polish countess whom he courted for fifteen years by correspondence, and some of the finest novels in the Realist tradition.

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