Summary: Laure Surville, was born Laure Balzac September 29, 1800 in Tours and died in Paris 9th on January 4, 1871. Favourite sister of the writer Honoré de Balzac, she published a biography of the latter after his death, Balzac, his life and his works according to his correspondence. She also wrote texts that served as the basis for some of Balzac's "four-handed" novels. This is the case of Cuckoo's Journey, which Balzac transformed into : Un début dans la vie (A Beginning in Life), which appeared as a serial in the magazine La Législature under the title Le Danger des mystifications (The Danger of Mystifications) in 1842, then in 1845 in the second Charles Furne edition of La Comédie humaine, classified in the Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes from Private Life). Laure Balzac began her career as an author by writing under the pseudonym "Lelio", for literary magazines for children. She then published under the name of " Laure Surville ", where she expressed her equivocal feeling towards the status of married women writers. In the portrait gallery of women in La Comédie humaine, she represents righteousness and wisdom. We recognize scattered fragments of her personality in Eugénie Grandet, but also Marguerite, the eldest daughter of Balthazar Claës in La Recherche de l'absolu. Balzac pays a heartfelt tribute to his sister in his short story Le Voyage en coucou, from which he drew inspiration for his novel Un début dans la vie (A Beginning in Life). And Laure Surville will later publish her short story under the signature of Laure in 1854. The writer thus dedicates A Beginning in Life (1842) to his sister: "To Laure. That the brilliant and modest spirit which gave me the subject of this scene has the honor of it. His brother. »

Books of Laure Surville (née Balzac)