Used book – Jeanne, Jacqueline de Romilly

Here is Jacqueline de Romilly's secret book.

Written in the year following her mother's death in 1977, she had a few copies printed to give to her friends. But out of modesty, out of respect, because there is something vulgar in allowing oneself to be questioned about what is most intimate, and because she abhorred vulgarity, she did not wish for this book to be published during her lifetime and entrusted her publisher and friend Bernard de Fallois with publishing it after her death.

Here she paints the portrait of a multi-talented, tireless woman who demonstrated recognized writing talent for thirty years but never achieved true success. After losing her husband at the beginning of the Great War, she chose to live in her daughter's shadow. Jacqueline de Romilly brings to life an entire era of early 20th-century French life around her.

But it is also the account - one is almost tempted to say the confession - of the indissoluble union of a daughter and her mother. Jacqueline de Romilly tells us a great deal about herself on this occasion, and we better understand the mixed feeling of admiration, sympathy, gratitude, and affection that her readers, even if they had never met her, felt upon learning of her passing.