{"product_id":"the-lily-in-the-valley-isbn-9781681377988","title":"The Lily in the Valley","description":"\u003cb\u003eA new translation of one of Balzac’s finest novels, this tale of misguided passion centers on a young aristocrat who falls into a cloaked, coded entanglement with an older countess—a relationship that is upended when he becomes involved with a new lover.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A story of impossible and unsatisfied desire, Balzac’s \u003ci\u003eThe Lily in the Valley\u003c\/i\u003e opens with a scene of desire unleashed. Félix de Vandenesse, the shy teenage scion of an aristocratic family, is at a ball, when his eyes are drawn to a beautiful woman in fashionable undress: before he knows what he is doing, he throws himself upon her, covering her bare back with kisses. In shock, she pushes him away. He leaves the party in shame.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The woman at the party is Henriette de Mortsauf, married to a much older count. Time passes, and Félix is reintroduced to her. Nothing is said of what transpired, though nothing is forgotten, and a courtship begins whose premise is that Félix will worship Henriette without displaying the least sign of desire. He waits on her. He plays endless board games with her impossible husband. He develops a language of flowers and presents her with elaborately coded bouquets. Félix and Henriette are in a swoon, until he departs for Paris to pursue a career in politics and takes up with the uninhibited Arabella Dudley. Meanwhile Henriette is on her deathbed. She writes him, “Do you remember your kisses? They have dominated my life and furrowed my soul. . . . They are my death!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Lily in the Valley\u003c\/i\u003e is a terrible fairy tale of two people lost in a game of love—or is it? Peter Bush’s new translation brings out the psychological dynamics of one of Balzac’s masterpieces.“An imagination of the highest power, an unequalled intensity of vision. . . . What [Balzac] did above all was to read the universe, as hard and as loud as he could, into the France of his time.” —Henry James\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe dramatic impasse of passion and its containment—it at times reads as the irresolvable conflict of eros and the death drive—animates The Lily in the Valley, sustains it as a challenging experience of reading. It is good to have it back, freshly translated. It has not grown old. —Peter Brooks, \u003ci\u003eNYRB\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Lily in the Valley\u003c\/i\u003e, with its focus on love rather than money, is something of an outlier among [Balzac’s] books. It is also, at least in its depiction of its main character’s wretched childhood, Balzac’s most autobiographical novel…. Early 19th-century French society comes alive.” —Heller McAlpin, \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"It is an outlier in Balzac’s work, and many of the generalisations we make about him won’t easily apply to it. It may be his most Romantic book: more lyrical, subtler and more autobiographical.\"  — Raymond N. MacKenzie, \u003ci\u003eLondon Review of Books \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It is a perplexing novel, and one that shows a side of Balzac not often seen…. Balzac took as his basis well-established tropes — the forbidden romance, the love triangle of differing temperaments, the unhappily married woman, the young man on the rise — and the epistolary novel form to create a pre-Freudian exploration of thwarted, repressed sexuality and deceit (of self and others).” —Eric Vanderwall, \u003ci\u003eOn the Seawall\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Lily in the Valley\u003c\/i\u003e is an engaging and affecting story… an incisive study of the constrained realities of women’s lives during the early 19th century, with the author showing his characteristic deep empathy for their plight, along with an ironic perception of masculine arrogance and complacency.” —Rob Latham, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Lily in the Valley\u003c\/i\u003e is an odd duck—an ambitious, wonderful, uneven novel, but one so good and so rich that you have to give him credit for not going right back to the grim hard-times world of \u003ci\u003ePère Goriot\u003c\/i\u003e.\" — Gideon Leek, \u003ci\u003eThe Harvard Review \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eHonoré de Balzac\u003c\/b\u003e (1799–1850), one of the greatest and most influential  of novelists, began his career as a pseudonymous writer of  sensational potboilers before achieving success with a historical novel,  \u003ci\u003eThe Chouans\u003c\/i\u003e. Balzac then conceived his great work, \u003ci\u003eLa Comédie humaine\u003c\/i\u003e,  an ongoing series of novels in which he set out to offer a complete  picture of contemporary society and manners. Always working under an  extraordinary burden of debt, Balzac wrote some eighty-five novels in  the course of his last twenty years. Also available from NYRB Classics are Balzac’s \u003ci\u003eThe Unknown Masterpiece\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Memoirs of Two Young Wives\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Human Comedy: Selected Stories\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePeter Bush\u003c\/b\u003e is an award-winning translator who has translated several books for NYRB Classics, including Josep Pla’s \u003ci\u003eThe Gray Notebook\u003c\/i\u003e, Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s \u003ci\u003eThe Tyrant Banderas\u003c\/i\u003e, and Joan Sales’s \u003ci\u003eUncertain Glory\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in the UK.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eGeoffrey O'Brien\u003c\/b\u003e is an American poet, editor, book and film critic,  translator, and cultural historian. He served as Editor-in-Chief of The  Library of America for several years. His latest book, \u003ci\u003eArabian Nights of 1934,\u003c\/i\u003e will be published in June 2023. He lives in Brooklyn.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304130629861,"sku":"NP9781681377988","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681377988.jpg?v=1767740243","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-lily-in-the-valley-isbn-9781681377988","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}