European Realism

Honoré de Balzac undertook one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the novel: La Comédie Humaine, a cycle of roughly ninety interconnected novels and stories intended to form a complete social portrait of France under the Restoration and July Monarchy. Recurring characters move between individual works, reappearing at different stages of their lives, a technique that gives the whole cycle the density of a lived social world. Le Père Goriot (1835), centered on a father's ruinous devotion to his social-climbing daughters, remains one of the most widely read entries in the series and a key statement of Balzac's realist method.