SOURCE: "Eugénie Grandet," in Every Saturday, Vol. III, No. 6, February 8, 1873, pp. 148-50.

In the following essay, the critic reviews the plot of Eugénie Grandet, providing running commentary throughout.

The lives of women, and especially of young women, are often strangely separated from the life of the principal personage of the house they live in. There are houses, especially in small country towns, where there is a remarkable difference of scale in the interests of the lives that are passed in them; where the father is occupied with vast pecuniary transactions, and the daughters are economizing shillings; where the father takes a share in considerable public concerns, and the daughters have the field of their activities limited to the garden and the Sunday-school; where the father gets richer or poorer every day, and yet no one in the household knows anything of the fluctuations in his fortune...