Recommendations
Books Like Eugénie Grandet
Best books to read after Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's Eugénie Grandet is one of the most emotionally concentrated novels in the French tradition — a short, devastating portrait of a miser's daughter in provincial Saumur, whose capacity for love is utterly wasted by the world Balzac has constructed for her. These recommendations extend the experience through Balzac's other novels and through classic fiction about money, avarice, and provincial life.
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Père Goriot
by Honoré de Balzac
The most natural companion to Eugénie Grandet in La Comédie Humaine — both novels are about a parent whose relationship to their child is organized around money and possessiveness, and both end with the parent's destruction. Père Goriot and Eugénie Grandet together define the emotional range of Balzac's domestic fiction.
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Lost Illusions
by Honoré de Balzac
If Eugénie Grandet leaves you wanting more Balzac, Lost Illusions is the natural next step — Balzac's greatest and most ambitious novel, about Lucien de Rubempré's disillusionment in Paris. Where Eugénie Grandet is a portrait of provincial narrowness, Lost Illusions is a portrait of metropolitan corruption.
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Silas Marner
by George Eliot
Eliot's 1861 novel about a weaver-miser whose isolation is broken by the arrival of a foundling child is the direct British counterpart to Père Grandet's portrait of avarice — and its resolution (the miser is redeemed by love) is the redemptive ending that Balzac's novel refuses.
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The Miser
by Molière
Molière's 1668 play about Harpagon, the classic miser of French literature, is Père Grandet's theatrical predecessor — both are portraits of avarice as a consuming passion that distorts all family relationships. Reading both together shows how Balzac transforms the comic miser type into something tragic.
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A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge and Balzac's Père Grandet were created in the same decade and are the two great misers of nineteenth-century European fiction. Where Balzac shows what avarice costs the miser's family, Dickens shows what it costs the miser himself — and offers redemption where Balzac offers none.
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Ethan Frome
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's spare portrait of a man trapped in a loveless provincial life shares Eugénie Grandet's interest in what narrow, constrained circumstances do to people of genuine feeling — both novels are about emotional generosity wasted in environments too small and too mean to use it.
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The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
Eliot's Maggie Tulliver, like Eugénie Grandet, is a woman of exceptional capacity whose provincial environment cannot accommodate her — both are portraits of intelligent, feeling women destroyed by the social and family structures they were born into.
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Washington Square
by Henry James
James's novel about Catherine Sloper, the plain, gentle daughter of a cold, brilliant father who is unable to love her — a portrait of a father-daughter relationship organized around the father's contempt rather than Grandet's avarice, but equally devastating in its portrait of what the wrong parent does to a child's capacity for happiness.
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