Esclave... ou reine?
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers with intermediate French who want to strengthen their feel for the language through original fiction
- Those interested in twentieth-century French popular romance and the history of mass reading
- Casual readers who enjoy emotional suspense and identity reversals
- Literature students studying the portrayal of women in popular fiction
Not a good fit for
- Beginners in French who cannot yet read original fiction independently
- Readers who prefer serious literary experimentation and complex narrative structures
- Readers put off by conventional romance formulas and period gender attitudes
Reading tips
- Read through the chapters first to grasp the character relationships, then return to sort out what "slave" and "queen" in the title refer to.
- French learners can read one or two chapters a day, noting common expressions in emotional description and dialogue.
- While reading, note how the female characters' choices are driven by family and social circumstances, and keep brief notes.
- Consult histories of French popular literature to learn about the publication and readership of works under the Delly byline.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is Delly a single author?
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About the author
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.
