The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, with only two main characters, is a small-scale chamber work, one of the last French epistolary novels, a mode that belongs more to the previous century than to the 1840s. It too is a coming-of-age story, but instead of the young man from the provinces who trades his innocence for vaulting ambition and lays siege to French society, it’s made up of the letters exchanged between two young women who leave a Carmelite convent before taking their vows, confronting the limited choices available to them in the wider world. Both spring from the minor aristocracy, their convent life the consequence of their social position, not any religious vocation. Despite the rights granted to women under Napoleon’s more egalitarian civil code, still in force after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, their inheritances were to be diverted to foster the fortunes of their brothers, the eldest sons who would carry the family title. In the convent they have developed a deep bond, a “secret inner life” that would be played out in their letters. At one level the novel would be a bold exploration of female friendship, surprising from so masculine a writer as Balzac, the titanic figure we know from Rodin’s sculpted image. The letters make up a rich tapestry of private life and feeling for women barred from playing any public role. They tell a story of the opposite paths the two of them take in love and marriage, mapping more intimate ground than the social novels for which Balzac has been most appreciated.

That intimacy, with its direct access to the inner life behind the social mask, is a hallmark of the epistolary novels on which Balzac modeled this work, especially Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48), the longest English novel, perhaps the first psychological novel, and its French offshoot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), two celebrated works centered on women, both of them among Balzac’s most cherished books. Falling in love with her tutor, an exiled, impoverished Spanish nobleman, one of Balzac’s protagonists, Louise, like Rousseau’s Julie, actually reenacts some of the medieval Heloise story, her forbidden romance with the philosopher and rising churchman Peter Abelard. Meanwhile, her bosom friend Renée quickly makes a marriage of convenience to the frail son of Provençal gentry, twenty years her elder. Both women embark on discreet missions of redemption, lending their strength to the damaged men they marry. The Spaniard Felipe, heir to a dukedom but deemed an enemy by Spain’s Bourbon king, has ceded to a younger brother both his title and the woman he loved. Repeatedly described as physically ugly, “an old young man,” he can’t imagine attracting another woman until he falls for the witty, vivacious, and passionate Louise. Renée’s husband Louis is even more needy, for he’s returned a broken man from Russian captivity in Napoleon’s wars. With support from her friend Louise, she deftly manages both his family life and his advancement to a title and a parliamentary position.

All this backstory is sketched in only briefly since the men in the book are dim figures, rarely heard from directly, seen almost entirely through the lens of the confiding women. Socially, these women take care to recede into the shadows, especially Renée, who is eager to maintain the appearance of a proper wife and mother. But the letters, free of any third-person narration, highlight their inner strength, their depth of feeling, and their starkly conflicting views of love and marriage. Louise is very much the romantic heroine, determined to live out a grand passion with the men she loves. Felipe himself is a figure out of romance, not only a Spaniard, hence broodingly grave and hot-blooded, but “the last Abencerrage,” descended from the fiery Moors who conquered parts of Spain from North Africa until they were expelled or Christianized toward the end of the fifteenth century. (Their legend had only recently been popularized on the stage and in an 1826 tale by Chateaubriand.) Louise’s second great love, even more intense and possessive, involves another romantic figure, barely realized, a stereotypical poet. With him she leaves Paris for a bucolic love nest, not far from the city, that excludes society altogether.

Renée, on the other hand, in her own deep provincial life, blends in effortlessly with both nature and society. Pragmatically, she accepts marriage to a man she does not love, a marriage of companionship, social ambition, and common interest. “My life may never be great, but it will be tranquil, smooth, and untroubled,” or so she imagines. She takes care to create a beautiful landscape, directs her passion toward motherhood and her busy mind to advancing her weakened husband’s position. When children do come, Balzac’s physical evocation of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and childcare make up some of the most astonishing pages in the book, written completely from a woman’s point of view. (Balzac saw himself as an androgynous figure with a “woman’s heart.”) Renée lives in her body, in her maternal feeling, while leading from behind. Her approach to marriage is thoroughly rational—though far too “calculating,” in the view of her friend—but her tormenting anxieties about the children, especially when one of them falls ill, parallel the anxiety Louise has about her lovers. The pangs of jealousy threaten Louise’s romantic dream and drive her to a theatrical, almost operatic denouement anticipated from the very first page of the novel.

By the end it has long been clear that the book is less about two women and their stories than a trenchant dialogue about love and marriage by a writer who never hesitated to weave direct commentary and social argument into his story, contrasting these women not by their style or their voices, as Rousseau himself urged (and as a modern writer surely would), but by their clashing ideas. This makes The Memoirs of Two Young Wives as much a dialectical as an epistolary novel, built on the contrasts and binaries embodied in the two women’s unfolding lives, for all their nourishing friendship. Louise first emerges as a “blithe and worldly girl” in glittering society, witty and sardonic, something of a Jane Austen heroine.