Delly

Delly is the joint pen name of the French authors Jeanne-Marie Petitjean de La Rosière (1875–1947) and her brother Frédéric Petitjean de La Rosière (1876–1949). Public information about their true identities is limited. Under this pen name they co-wrote more than a hundred romance novels that were highly popular between 1910 and 1950, making them a representative pair in French popular fiction. The library holds four of their works, including L‘étincelle, L‘Exilee, Entre Deux Ames, and Esclave... ou reine?, whose themes mostly revolve around emotional entanglements, women’s circumstances, and turns of fate, with accessible and fluent plots typical of popular romance. Representative titles such as The Servant or the Queen and Between Two Souls are also often mentioned, reflecting the pen name’s enduring influence in the French mass-reading market in the first half of the twentieth century.