Lilies in the valley

Unlike many of Balzac's other novels in which the author acts as a critic of the social, political or moral conditions of his time, The Lily of the Valley is dedicated to a private theme, the relationship between a man and a woman, and in this sense it is timeless.

The narrator first describes his gloomy childhood, when he suffered from being sent away from home to be brought up, feeling unloved, and then in adolescence, humiliated by poverty and hopelessly longing for affection and a woman. One day this twenty-year-old boy, neither emotionally nor physically yet developed, finds himself at a country fair where he meets a woman in whom all his previous longings are suddenly embodied, and in a sudden lapse of sense he kisses her bare shoulders.

From this moment, the story of a fateful love affair unfolds between Félix and the married Madame de Mortsauf, who is suffering in an unhappy marriage to a tyrannical and unstable old man. Balzac shows great mastery in the twists and turns of her relationship with Félix, full of disappointment and hope, renunciation and growing intimacy. The unexpectedly ironic conclusion then underlines the extraordinary impact of the work, in which the author paid homage to the first woman in his life, Madame de Berny.

The novel is being published in Czech for the first time in almost forty-five years as the first volume of the World Classics series, which presents both well-known and lesser-known works by the geniuses of world literature from recent centuries. The criterion for selection is whether they have stood the test of time and are able to appeal to today's reader.