Her translations include Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier (Penguin), Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos (Penguin), The Wild Ass's Skin by Balzac, The Conquest of Plassans and A Love Story by Zola and Flaubert's Sentimental Education, all for the Oxford World's Classics.

She is also the general editor of a series of 'City Tales' for OUP. Her volumes of translated stories, Paris Tales, Paris Metro Tales, Paris Street Tales and French Tales are published by Oxford University Press. Helen Constantine taught languages in schools until 2000, when she became a full-time translator. Nana comes to symbolize the Second Empire regime itself in all its excesses but in the final chapters, the narrator seems to suggest that the coming disaster is not so much a result of the corruption of the Empire, as of rampant female sexuality. The novel opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan élite, was la Ville Lumière, the glittering setting-and object-of Zola's scathing denunciation of society's hypocrisy and moral corruption. Nana is the ninth instalment in the twenty volume Rougon-Macquart series. Nana herself meets a terrible fate, consumed by her own dissipation and extravagance, just as the disastrous war with Prussia is declared. A sexually magnetic high-class prostitute and actress, she becomes a celebrity, rapidly conquering society, ruining all men who fall under her spell-especially Count Muffat, Chamberlain to the Empress. Nana, daughter of a drunk and a laundress, is the Helen of Troy of Paris. 'She was the golden beast, an unconscious force, the very scent of her could bring the world to ruin.' Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public Health.The European Society of Cardiology Series.Oxford Commentaries on International Law.

Nana emile zola