The reality behind the novels

‘I never knew peaceful times’, Irène Némirovsky once said, ‘I’ve always lived in anxiety and often in danger’.

‘I never knew peaceful times’, Irène Némirovsky once said, ‘I’ve always lived in anxiety and often in danger’. This comment was made during a radio interview in 1934, when the novelist, who would later write Suite Française, was in fact living through the only peaceful period of her life. She had survived the pogroms of her childhood in Kiev and the dangers of her family’s flight from St Petersburg during the October Revolution. In Paris she had gone through a difficult period of resettlement before achieving her childhood dream of becoming a celebrated French writer. In 1934 she had eight years left to live, four of which were to be overshadowed by the approach and arrival of war.

The authors of this first full biography have been able to consult Némirovsky’s working notebooks and draft manuscripts that were previously thought to have been lost, as well as the memories of her oldest daughter, Denise Epstein.