Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
B.alzac had a sister, an ante-litteram feminist, who helped him write his novels. There is also his hand behind the masterpieces of Comédie humaine. Perhaps for this very reason the work of Laure Surville de Balzac (18001871) fell into oblivion, as it happened for many artists of the time.
“I wonder why I can’t live as I like and realize my projects,” Laure wondered. Thus he spent his life supporting the great Honoré de Balzac materially and psychologically.
A year younger, shy and reserved, while wishing to be recognized as a writer, Laure ended up staying in the shadow of her brotherembodying the figure of the ignored martyr like Eugénie Grandet, one of Balzac’s great characters.
The family and literary communication between brother and sister was discordant as it united affective attachment to the affirmation of man’s intellectual superiority, while the woman was destined to strengthen the ranks of the unrecognized authors of the nineteenth century.
Extreme act of love and oppression, Balzac transforms the story sent to her by her favorite sister, Le Voyage en coucouin a novel, A debut dans la vie (1842).
“The Cloud Fairy or Queen Mab” Laure Surville de Balzac (Alpes).
Intrigued by the relationship between Balzac and his sister, the publisher Alpes has now decided to rediscover the work of Laure Surville by publishing The Cloud Fairy or Queen Mabthe first of five novels, all of which will be translated by Rosa Romano Toscani.
With a captivating pen that evokes Gothic manors and fantasies, the narrator traverses the story of Élianea little girl similar to Laure, who learns, growing up, to give the right value to writing in order to better face adult life with its abandonments and disappointments.
Is it the mirror of the fate that fell to the authors of the time? Or Laure’s conscious choice to stay by her brother’s side to advise and protect him? The answer is perhaps in the pages of the Cloud Fairy.
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