num_pages: 138
description: La Femme de Gilles tells the story of a fatal love trianglewritten on the eve of World War II.Set among the dusty lanes and rolling valleys of rural 1930s Belgium La Femme de Gilles is the tale of a young mother Elisa whose world is overturned when she discovers that her husband Gilles has fallen in love with her younger sister Victorine. Devastated Elisa unravels. As controlled as Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment and as propulsive as Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation La Femme de Gilles is a hauntingly contemporary story of desperation and lust and obsession from an essential early-feminist writer.Just after her novel was first published in 1937 Madeleine Bourdouxhe disassociated herself from her publisher (which had been taken over by the Nazis) and spent most of World War II in Brussels actively working for the resistance. Though she continued to write her work was largely overlooked by history . . . until now.
language: English
title: La Femme de Gilles
publisher: Northwestern University Press