PENGUIN CLASSICS

OLD MAN GORIOT

HONORÉ DE BALZAC was born at Tours in 1799, the son of a civil servant. He spent nearly six years as a boarder in a Vendôme school, then went to live in Paris, working as a lawyer’s clerk, then as a hack writer. Between 1820 and 1824 he wrote a number of novels under various pseudonyms, many of them in collaboration, after which he unsuccessfully tried his luck at publishing, printing and type-founding. At the age of thirty, heavily in debt, he returned to literature with a dedicated fury and wrote the first novel to appear under his own name, The Chouans. During the next twenty years he wrote about ninety novels and shorter stories, among them many masterpieces, to which he gave the comprehensive title The Human Comedy. As Balzac himself put it: ‘What he [Napoleon] was unable to finish with the sword, I shall accomplish with the pen.’ He died in 1850, a few months after his marriage to Eveline Hanska, the Polish countess with whom he had maintained amorous relations for eighteen years.

OLIVIA McCANNON is a literary translator and writer based in London and Paris. She studied at the Queen’s College, Oxford (French/German), then at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), on an Entente Cordiale scholarship. Her translation work includes nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry and contemporary Francophone plays (Royal Court theatre). She has received various awards, including a Hawthornden Fellowship (2005). Her writing has been broadcast on BBC Radios 3 and 4 and her poetry collection Exactly my own Length is published by Carcanet/Oxford Poets (2011).

GRAHAM ROBB studied French and German at Oxford and took his doctorate at Vanderbilt University. His books include Balzac (1994), Unlocking Mallarmé (1996), Victor Hugo (1997), Rimbaud (2000) and Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (2003). The Discovery of France (2007), based in part on 14,000 miles’ cycling in France, won both the Duff Cooper Prize and the 2008 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris came out in 2010.