“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
The 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, NYRB
“The Lily in the Valley, 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, The Wall Street Journal
“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, London Review of Books
“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, On the Seawall
“The Lily in the Valley 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, Los Angeles Review of Books
“The Lily in the Valley 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 Père Goriot.” — Gideon Leek, The Harvard Review
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