La Femme de trente ans is a composite novel, formed of episodes first published separately, then gathered around a single heroine, Julie d'Aiglemont, whose life it follows from youth to old age. As a young woman, Julie marries out of illusion a brilliant officer, the Marquis Victor d'Aiglemont, whom she believes she loves; but the marriage quickly proves disappointing, her husband being a mediocre man incapable of understanding her or making her happy. Thus begins the long disenchantment of an intelligent, sensitive woman enclosed in a loveless union. Through Julie's successive ages, Balzac constructs the type of the "woman of thirty": no longer the naive girl but the mature woman, come to full consciousness of herself, of her desires and regrets, and capable of a passion at once deeper and more melancholy. Julie will know a true love, faults, bereavements, and guilt; one of the most famous episodes, almost romanesque, stages pirates and reveals a family secret, while Julie's tormented relations with her children, notably her daughter Hélène, add a tragic dimension. The novel ends on the heroine's old age, weighed down by a whole existence of compromise and hidden suffering. Despite its visible seams, the work has been highly influential: it popularized the idea that a woman attains her full sentimental flowering at maturity, and fixed a durable literary figure. Balzac analyzes conjugal boredom, adultery, difficult motherhood, and feminine aging with a new acuity. La Femme de trente ans is less a unified narrative than a study, in several tableaux, of a whole woman's life.