Lady L. by Romain Gary (First British edition with dust jacket by Lesley Blanch)
GARY, Romain. Lady L. London: Michael Joseph, 1959.
First British edition. Author’s first novel written directly in English. Dust jacket by Lesley Blanch.
Romain Gary (1914-1980, born Roman Kacew), was a French writer-diplomat, born in Lithuania, brought up in Warsaw and Nice. During the war Gary was a Free French airman, one of only five of the Free French Air Force Squadron’s original 113 volunteers to have survived the war. His first book – Education europeeanne (1945) (Forest of Anger) was among France’s foremost bestsellers, and it became ‘not a novel of the Resistance but the novel of the Resistance’. In 1945 Gary married the English writer Lesley Blanch (1904-2007), and commenced his work as a diplomat, serving in Bulgaria, Switzerland, and at the United Nations.
Gary was appointed consul general for France to Los Angeles, where he wrote Lady L., a Pygmalion-like transformation of a beautiful prostitute into an elegant aristocrat, trained to infiltrate circles of money and power by her anarchist lover. But the heroine has other designs, and as the dust jacket illustration suggests ‘a certain form of detached sophistication can be more anarchistic and subversive in its nature than the bombs of the conventional enemies of society’.
8vo, original cloth. Very good in very good dust jacket (small abrasion to spine; not price-clipped)