The complete online text of Ursula by Honoré de Balzac.

Had Balzac been a less masterful novelist, the disreputably profligate fraud in him might have overwhelmed his artistry. Still, the other Balzac, the artist, is tainted by his well-earned reputation for what has been called artistic license or dishonesty...

The French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was the first writer to use fiction to convey the total social scene prevailing within one country at a particular period in its history. Commonly regarded as the founder of social realism, he also...

Poet and wife of the composer Ursula Vaughan Williams was a complicated person. Her father and her first husband were soldiers - so her early years were conventional and there was apparently a Betjemanesque touch of "jolly hockey sticks" about her. Yet her...

Ursula Wyndham achieved unlikely celebrity late in life by publishing two volumes of autobiography. Their success was the more unexpected because her books were aristocratic memoirs of an existence even less eventful than is usual in a woman of her background, but the unfashionable...

Ursula Vaughan Williams, who wrote librettos for her composer husband and produced his biography, has died at age 96.She died Tuesday in London, Gwen Knighton of the English Folk Dance and Song Society said Thursday. Vaughan Williams, who was president of the society, had been...

Petr EbenPRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) — Czech composer Petr Eben, whose wide variety of music has been performed around the globe, has died. He was 78.Eben died late Wednesday at his home in Prague, his son Marek told the CTK news agency Thursday. He was...