The Lily of the Valley

Autobiographical and exceptionally romantic, „The Lily of the Valley” is an 1835 novel about love and society by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) and is one of his personal favorites among his innumerable novels. The creator of the „Human Comedy” brings his creative insight to a portrait of a lady and a love affair set in the Loire valley. It concerns the affection – emotionally vibrant but never consummated – between Felix de Vandenesse and Henriette de Mortsauf. The young and successful Felix, a young man with a dark past – always turned away, always unloved, begins a forthright correspondence on the subject of love with Henriette. Her unexpected reply to his candid reminiscences, however, reveals the truth about his „lily of the valley” and the feminine side of amour.

The Greatest Literary Masterpieces for the Holiday Season : 150 Everlasting Masterpieces of the World Literature

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Stendhal, Jules Verne, Gustave Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, Theodor Storm, Henrik Ibsen, Charles Dickens, Plato, Honoré de Balzac, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rabindranath Tagore, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Walt Whitman, Niccolò Machiavelli, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, Giovanni Boccaccio, Confucius, George MacDonald, Bram Stoker, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, Emily Brontë, Henry David Thoreau, Jack London, Henry James, Louisa May Alcott, Victor Hugo, Arthur Conan Doyle, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Hardy, Jonathan Swift, Edith Wharton, Benito Pérez Galdós, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Alexandre Dumas, Rudyard Kipling, William Dean Howells, Kalidasa, Kenneth Grahame, Marcel Proust, Washington Irving, Juan Valera, Willa Cather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Homer, Gaston Leroux, Charles Baudelaire, William Makepeace Thackeray, Voltaire, Kate Chopin, Apuleius, John Milton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frederick Douglass, Laozi, John Keats, James Joyce, Ann Ward Radcliffe, Kahlil Gibran, Kakuzo Okakura, Soseki Natsume, Princess Der Ling, L. Frank Baum, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Barrie, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, L. M. Montgomery, C. S. Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, H. P. Lovecraft, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marcus Aurelius, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lewis Wallace, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Sir, George Bernard Shaw, Miguel de Cervantes, Mary Shelley, Cao Xueqin, Emile Zola, Válmíki, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, P. B. Shelley, Elizabeth von Arnim, Herman Hesse, Dante, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Sun Tzu, Inazo Nitobé, George Weedon Grossmith, Willkie Collins