SOURCE: An introduction to Eugénie Grandet, by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Ellen Marriage, The Heritage Press, 1961, pp. ix-xvi.

Aldington is perhaps best known as the editor of the Imagist periodical the Egoist and as an influential member of the Imagist movement, whose other members included Hilda Doolittle—who became Aldington's first wife in 1913—Ezra Pound, and Amy Lowell. As a literary critic and biographer, he combined his skills as a poet, his sensitivity as a reader, and his personal reminiscences to produce criticism that is creative as well as informative. In the preface to the Heritage Press edition of Eugénie Grandet, Aldington offers a highly appreciative general essay on the work, which he deems "not only one of the very best of Balzac's vast output of fiction, " but one of "the few novels which so far have survived the changes of time and fashion."

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