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Eugene Sue was born in 1804 to a doctor in Napoleon's army. Following his disappointing performance as a medical student, he enrolled in the French navy as a surgeon's assistant. Upon his discharge in 1829, he moved to Paris, where he proceeded to write nautical and adventure novels. Sue inherited a large fortune on the death of his father in 1830 but ran through it quickly. He took to the writing of serial novels in newspapers in order to support himself. Sue won election to the National Assembly in 1850 as a Socialist delegate. After speaking out against Louis- Napoleon's coup d'etat, he was briefly imprisoned in 1851 and, after his release, went into exile in Annecy, in the French Alps. He died in Annecy in 1857, just after completing The Mysteries of the People, which was immediately banned by the French government. Jonathan Loesberg is a professor of English at American University. He is the author of Fictions of Consciousness: Mill, Newman and the Reading of Victorian Prose and Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida and de Man. Carolyn Betensky is an assistant professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar in the University Center for Human Values and the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.
Sue s The Mysteries of Paris not only influenced Les Miserables, it also gave rise to a subgenre of Gothicky novels about the dark underside of big cities, including London, New Orleans and Philadelphia (George Lippard s notorious The Quaker City ). Aristocrats with secrets, a prostitute with a heart of gold, criminals nicknamed the Schoolmaster and the She-Wolf, an evil lawyer, thwarted love, blackmail and conspiracy this is a sprawling novel that packs in everything and then adds more. -Michael Dirda, The Washington Post One might not think that a gargantuan Parisian novel, published in 150 newspaper episodes in the middle of the 19th century, would fill anyone's 21st-century bill as an absolute ripsnorter - but Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris does exactly that Few books are more earnest, and few read so fresh, so gloriously now. Part of that freshness comes down to the laurel-winning translation by Carolyn Betensky and Jonathan Loesberg Even a bibliographic-centric Schoolmaster will not find for you a better novel in this annum, or most others. -The Philadelphia Inquirer
