Original Image
click to view more

Memoirs of Two Young Wives

by Memoirs of Two Young Wives

$18.24

List Price: $18.95
Save: $0.71 (3%)
add to favourite
  • In Stock soon, order now to reserve your copy.
  • FREE DELIVERY
  • 24/24 Online
  • Yes High Speed
  • Yes Protection
Tell-A-Friend
Last update:

Description

Two very intelligent, very idealistic young women leave the convent school where they became the fastest of friends to return to their families and embark on their new lives. For Renée de Maucombe, this means an arranged marriage with a country gentleman of Provence, a fine if slightly dull man for whom she feels admiration but nothing more. Meanwhile, Louise de Chaulieu makes for her family's house in Paris, intent on enjoying her freedom to the fullest: glittering balls, the opera, and above all, she devoutly hopes, the torments and ecstasies of true love and passion. What will come of these very different lives?

Despite Honoré de Balzac's title, these aren't memoirs; rather, this is an epistolary novel. For some ten years, these two will--enthusiastically if not always faithfully--keep up their correspondence, obeying their vow to tell each other every tiny detail of their strange new lives, comparing their destinies, defending and sometimes bemoaning their choices, detailing the many changes, personal and social, that they undergo. As Balzac writes, "Renée is reason...Louise is wildness...and both will lose." Balzac being Balzac, he seems to argue for the virtues of one of these lives over the other; but Balzac being Balzac, that argument remains profoundly ambiguous. "I would," he once wrote, "rather be killed by Louise than live a long life with Renée."

Last updated on

Product Details

  • NYRB Classics Brand
  • Jan 9, 2018 Pub Date:
  • 9781681371252 ISBN-13:
  • 1681371251 ISBN-10:
  • English Language
  • 8.1 in * 0.6 in * 5 in Dimensions:
  • 1 lb Weight: