Lady L
Press copy, stamped as such.
Inscribed by Romain Gary.
Original publisher’s wraparound band mounted at front.
Written directly in English and first published in 1959, Lady L. appeared in French in 1963, in a translation by Jean Rosenthal revised by Gary himself. It was the first of the novels Gary wrote in his adopted language, which he had learned with the help of Lesley Blanch, the British writer and his first wife.
Behind Lady L., the scandalous English grande dame of the novel, one easily recognizes the romantic shadow of Lesley Blanch: her elegance, her appetite for adventure and her refusal of convention. Gary turns this intimate model into a brilliant picaresque comedy, in which a former laundress turned duchess recalls her love for Armand Denis, a magnificent and impossible anarchist.
Beneath the wit and irony lies one of Gary’s central themes: distrust of ideologies that sacrifice real human beings to abstract ideas of humanity.
This copy has a strong Lebanese connection. In 1964, Gary stayed in Beirut with Jean Seberg, who was filming several scenes of Jean Becker’s Échappement libre with Jean-Paul Belmondo.
The copy comes from the library of Guy Abela, a Lebanese Francophone poet and collector.
Some foxing to endleaves and wrappers; light wear to the binding.