Madeleine Bourdouxhe was born in Belgium in 1906. Her first novel, La Femme de Gilles, was published in 1937, but the outbreak of World War II interrupted her writing career, and her second book, A la recherche de Marie wasn't published until 1943. A volume of shorts stories, A Nail, a Rose, first appeared in English in 1989, followed by translations of La Femme de Gilles and A la recherche de Marie. Bourdouxhe died in 1996.
