Coup de Grâce

First UK edition. 12mo. 125 pp. Green cloth boards, lettered in silver to spine. Printed dustwrapper (priced '10s. 6d. net' to front flap). Translated from the French by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author. Preceded earlier in the year by the U.S. Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy edition. Originally published in French as Le Coup de Grâce by Gallimard, Paris, in 1939.

Sunned strip at base of boards, moderately flecked textblock edges, closed tears to dustjacket folds, soiled lower panel, else Fine.

Author's second novel. By the first woman to be elected to the Académie française and author of Hadrian's Memoirs. Set in the Baltic provinces in the aftermath of World War I, Coup de Grâce tells the story of an intimacy that grows between three young people hemmed in by civil war, leading to inevitable tragedy.

Inspired by her unrequited love for her editor at Éditions Grasset, André Fraigneau, a pattern that would persist throughout her life – falling for homosexual men – even though Yourcenar self-identified as a lesbian. Basis for the 1976 German film Der Fangschuß by Volker Schlöndorff, starring Margarethe von Trotta, who's also had a hand in the screenplay. "[A] brief masterwork." –Mavis Gallant, The New York Review of Books