Coup de Grâce

First edition thus. 8vo. Pp. [xiv], 151. Cream cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine; cream endpapers. Jacket design by Colophon (priced £7.95 to front flap). Translated from the French by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author. With the full, nine-page preface by the author, truncated to a single-page foreword in the 1957 Secker & Warburg first U.K. Edition. The first edition in English was published by Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, New York, in 1957. Originally published in French as Le Coup de Grâce by Gallimard, Paris, in 1939.

Moderately tanned textblock, 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