A Modern Jezebel de Nemirovsky, Irene (translated by Barre Dunbar) - (c.1937)

New York: Henry Holt and Company. Very Good+ in Good dj. (c.1937). First American Edition. Hardcover. [light bumping to top corners, slight fading to cloth at edges, spine a little turned; jacket well-worn at edges, with some paper loss at spine ends (just barely brushing the "A" in the spine title) and at a few corners, 1-1/2" closed tear and associated diagonal crease at bottom of front panel, internal tape-repair to section of front hinge]. Rare novel by the recently-rediscovered author, who perished at Auschwitz in 1942, about the life of a woman who, as the book opens, is on trial (at the age of 60) for the murder of her 20-year-old alleged lover. Described on the jacket blurb as "one of the most distinguished Russian writers of today," the author was indeed Russian by birth (1903), but her family left the country following the Revolution and soon settled in Paris, where she lived and wrote (in French) for the rest of her life. (She had been exposed to French as a child, through a governess, and also attended the Sorbonne.) She turned out fourteen published novels during her lifetime, but only two (this being the second) were published in the U.S., and her modern reputation is founded -- rather oddly, when you think about it -- entirely on "rediscovered" works that were published long after her tragic death. (Arrested during the Occupation by the French police as "a stateless person of Jewish descent" -- although she herself had converted to Catholicism in 1939 -- she was packed off to Auschwitz, where she promptly died of typhus.) .