History of a success: Irène Némirovsky's posthumous reputation, 1944–2004

Abstract

This article analyses the publication history of Irène Némirovsky's posthumously published fiction in the period 1944–2004. Frequently presented as a ‘neglected’ writer, no attention has so far been paid to the variations in Némirovsky's post-war reputation, and no detailed analysis of the reasons why her work was not read in post-war France has so far been proposed. This article reads Némirovsky's posthumous reputation through the prism of the dynamics of cultural memory of the Second World War in France. Drawing on previously unpublished archival research, it traces Némirovsky's visibility in post-war French culture and demonstrates that the success of Suite française in 2004 was foreshadowed by a renewed interest in Némirovsky that began in the 1990s. In the twenty-first century, a new generation of readers fascinated by Holocaust testimony have found reasons to read Némirovsky once again.