Emile Zola

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.