This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.
The Ladies’ Paradise catapults the reader into the present-day world of consumer culture and marketing. It seems as if the store owners of today’s Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Neiman Marcus all read
The Ladies’ Paradise and made it their bible for creating desire for consumer goods. Emile Zola documents how the first department stores in nineteenth-century Paris made shopping into a religion, while he simultaneously woos readers with his gripping love story between the enterprising store owner Octave Mouret and the rags-to-riches heroine Denise Baudu.
About the author
Emile Zola, born in Paris in 1840, was raised in Aix en Provence in conditions of extreme poverty following the death of his father in 1847. In 1865, he decided to support himself by writing alone.
The Ladies’ Paradise is the eleventh novel in a series of twenty novels under the generic title
The Rougon-Macquarts: the Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire. In this series, published between 1871 and 1893, Zola scientifically documents the effects of heredity and environment on the Rougon-Marquart family.
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