Decadent Balzac: The author of La Comédie humaine as seen by British fin-de-siècle readers

Résumé 0

The closing decades of the nineteenth century, with the publication of three separate English-language translations of La Comédie humaine, saw an unprecedented, but relatively short-lived, interest in Balzac’s work. Writers of differing genres, as well as a number of painters, developed a remarkable fascination with his writings. They generally knew each other and exchanged, both in public and privately, their views on his works, thereby establishing a veritable critical dialogue. This overview is intended to illustrate the breadth of a phenomenon that went as far as to produce luxury editions of titles regarded as indecent. It concludes with an indication of some examples, hitherto little-known or inadequately studied, of the creative use to which a reading of Balzac was put by various exemplars of an “English Balzac,” namely Stevenson, Swinburne, Moore, and Gissing.