Jeanine Delpech

• 1. Introduction

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  Jeanine Delpech was born on the 1st of August 1905 at the Château du Prieuré in Évecquemont. Her father, Edmond Jean Frédéric Marie Delpech, was a lawyer. She died on the 3rd of July 1992, in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. In the eighty-six years between those two dates, most of her readers would have known her by a name other than her own. Delpech published under at least six distinct bylines over the course of her career. Some were masculine pen names. Some reflected the surnames of the two men she married. What drove a single writer to work beneath so many identities is a question her biography begins to answer.

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• 2. Identities in Print

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  In 1935, Delpech received a Bachelor of Arts degree in literature from the Faculty of Paris. She had already begun her literary career by then.

  Groupe Flammarion was among the publishers to which she supplied romance novels. For those works, she used the pen name Jean de Lutry, a masculine alias. A second masculine pseudonym, Robert Beauchamp, would later cover her detective fiction.

  In 1925, she became engaged to Antoine Goldet, then a student at the École Normale Supérieure. Their daughter, Nicole, was born the following year, and their son, François, in 1929.

  Works produced during and after that relationship sometimes carry the names Jeanine Goldet or Jeanine Antoine-Goldet. After a divorce, Delpech remarried in 1937 to Robert Tessier. Some later texts appeared as Louise Nelly Delpech-Teissier or Madame Robert Teissier.

  The Robert Beauchamp detective novels began appearing in 1961, with Flagrant Délire published by Presses de la Cité.

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• 3. Fiction and Scholarship

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  Les Nouvelles littéraires, a literary and artistic journal, was one of the main cultural publications where Delpech worked as a journalist for many years.

  La Double Mary, reine des voleurs au temps de Shakespeare, published in 1943, was among her earliest known works. Her career in fiction had begun with historical subjects, including criminal cases and famous criminals. Louise de Kéroualle appeared in 1949, followed by L'Âme de la Fronde : Madame de Longueville in 1957. That historical study earned her the Prix Alice-Louis-Barthou from the Académie Française in 1958.

  Cendrillon à Hollywood came out in 1951, followed by Les Fiancés de Venise in 1957. La Violette et l'Orchidée appeared in 1958.

  Les Nymphes d'Auteuil appeared in 1962, continuing the Robert Beauchamp detective series before it moved to the Le Masque collection in the 1970s. Six x = zéro and L'Héritière malgré elle both came out in 1971. Des nuits trop blanches followed in 1973.

  La Passion de la Marquise de Sade appeared in 1970, alongside historical output that included Gentleman jusqu'au crime in 1972.

  Les Noces de minuit (1955) and Le Serpent d'émeraude (1957) were among the romance novels she published under her actual name. A separate body of translation work from English ran alongside all of her original writing.

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• 4. The English Translations

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  Eh bien, ma jolie, Delpech's French rendering of a novel by James Hadley Chase, stands as one of three translations she completed from English.

  A second, Les Lévriers du seraglio, carried a novel by Mary Stewart into French. The third, Les Vertes Collines d'Afrique, translated a biographical account of Ernest Hemingway.

  Her 1964 historical study L'Amour le plus tendre : Le Chevalier de Boufflers et Mme de Sabran appeared during the same years as those translation projects.

  La Demoiselle à l'arsenic, published in 1973, was among her final listed historical works. It appeared more than two decades after her 1947 novel Les Liens de fumée.

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