Cousin Bette

Set in Paris, Cousin Bette tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family.  As in many of Balzac’s novels, its characters represent polarities of contrasting morality. Critics hailed the book as a turning point in the author’s art—a prototypical naturalist text.  Written in only two months, it is Balzac's last great work.

Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) was one of the supreme French novelists. His monumental series of stories and novels, La Comedie humaine, was his masterwork—describing life in France in the post-Napoleonic era. Regarded as a founding father of realism, his characters were drawn with a depth previously absent from literature.