Élyane Dezon-Jones, Professor of French Emerita at Wash- ington University, is a renowned specialist of modern manuscripts and member of the équipe Proust of the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM/CNRS). While teaching at Barnard College, she served as editor-in-chief of the Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Marcel Proust for seven years. She has published critical editions of Proust’s Le Côté de Guermantes (Flammarion, 1987) and Du côté de chez Swann (Livre de poche classique, 1992). She is also the author of Marie de Gournay: Fragments d’un discours féminin (Corti, 1988), a pioneer work showing her interest in French women writers.
In addition to the play Yourcenar sans masque and a study of Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien (with R. Poignault, Nathan, 1999), she published an annotated edition of Yourcenar’s notebooks, Sources II (1999), and collaborated with Michèle Sarde on the 1995 and 2004 editions of Yourcenar’s Correspondance (Gallimard). They are currently working on a critical edition of unpublished letters of Yourcenar to one of her famous editors.
Under the pen name Estelle Monbrun, Elyane Dezon-Jones is also the author of the widely translated mystery novels Meurtre chez Tante Léonie and Meurtre à Petite Plaisance, inspired by the creative universes of Proust and Yourcenar (Editions Viviane Hamy). She has been decorated with two French Knighthoods: Chevalier dans l’ Ordre des Palmes Académiques and Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.