WorkHonoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850)
AnalyzedReadMentioned
Documented 1845
Additional passages preserved in the Memoirs (1852)
Books
Selected engagements, in chronological order.
Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →
Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had this work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.
“We have just been reading 'Le Pere Goriot,' Balzac's most celebrated work; a remarkable production”
Life Without and Life Within (essays) · 'We have just been reading'
Explicit first-person statement 'We have just been reading Le Pere Goriot' places the book in her hands at a specific time.
“Seraphitus" is merely a specimen of his great powers of intellectual transposition.”
Fuller, Margaret. Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems. Edited by Arthur B. Fuller. Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860. · p165
“she found something of true portraiture in a disagreeable novel of Balzac's, 'Le Livre Mystique' in which an equivocal figure exerts alternately a masculine and a feminine influence on the characters of the plot.”
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.
Margaret Fuller identified "true portraiture" within Honoré de Balzac's Le Livre Mystique, a collection published in 1835. This identification points to the novella Séraphîta, which features an androgynous protagonist embodying a shifting masculine and feminine influence on other characters.