A Woman of Thirty

A hot-blooded, sinuously plotted novel by a nineteenth-century master of melodrama—the story of a stifled woman reckoning with the costs of following her heart. Beautiful and vivacious, Julie is not yet thirty when she becomes infatuated with Victor d’Aiglemont, a handsome young aide-de-camp in Napoleon’s army. Nor is she yet thirty when she becomes Madame d’Aiglemont—and discovers she has made a great mistake in marrying a careless, insensitive boor. When Julie falls in love with the Englishman Arthur Grenville, a chance at happiness seems to be within reach. But Julie’s conscience as a wife and her duties as a mother forbid her from pursuing and consummating her love, and Arthur dies, leaving her with a broken heart. Now, at thirty, with nothing to look forward to and only the rest of her life ahead of her, Julie is at a loss. Then the dashing Charles de Vandenesse enters her life, whereupon Julie realizes that she is still capable of loving and being loved, but that her relationship with her children, with her daughter Hélène, in particular, may never be the same again… Full of serendipitous encounters, twists and turns as delicious as they are unexpected, A Woman of Thirty is one of Balzac’s finest novels, at once a moving tale of passion and regret and a sensitive portrait of female psychology, rendered here in Jeanine Herman’s exquisite new translation.