A Note on the Text

Until recently, only a partial text of Fire in the Blood was thought to exist, typed up by Irene Nemirovsky's husband, Michel Epstein, to whom she often passed her manuscripts for this purpose. However, Michel's typing breaks off at the words 'I felt so old' (see p. 37), leaving the novel unfinished. Did Michel stop typing when Irene was arrested and deported to Auschwitz on 13 July 1942? Or perhaps even earlier in 1942, when she could no longer find a way to get her novels and short stories published?

As readers will learn from the Preface to the French edition of this novel found at the back of the book, it is likely that Nemirovsky was still working on Fire in the Blood in 1942. We know this thanks to the work of Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, who were commissioned to write a biography of Nemirovsky, and who began extensive research into her archive. Two pages of the original manuscript were found to have been in the suitcase that Nemirovsky's daughter, Denise Epstein, carried with her from Issy-l'Eve'que when she and her sister, Elisabeth, fled after their mother's arrest, and which contained Nernirovsky's great lost novel Suite Franfaise. And as Philipponnat and Lienhardt trawled the Nemirovsky archive at the Institut Memoires de l'edition contemporaine (IMEC), they discovered, amidst papers given by Nemirovsky for safe-keeping to her editor and family friend in the spring of 1942, the rest of the missing manuscript: thirty tightly packed pages of handwriting, with very few crossings out, the beginning of which corresponded to Michel's typed version.

It is an extraordinary collection of papers, which adds to our understanding of Nernirovsky's oeuvre. As well as the manuscript of Fire in the Blood, it contains Nemirovsky's working notebooks dating back to 1933, successive versions of several of her novels-including David Golder-as well as outlines for Captivite, the projected third part of Suite Franfaise.