The latest addition to my website is Irène Némirovsky‘s Jézabel (A Modern Jezebel; later: Jezebel). As the title indicates, this tells of a woman who is concerned almost exclusively with her good looks and having a good time. At the beginning of the book, Gladys Eysenach, a rich woman of Uruguayan descent, is on trial for the murder of a student, Bernard Martin. She does not deny having killed him and it seems that she is guilty. The trial reveals a certain amount of her life – her wealthy upbringing, her marriage to a rich man, now dead, the death of her daughter and her extravagant lifestyle. She is engaged to a fairly impoverished but dashing Italian count. She has met the student, seems to have spent some time with him, given him some money and then shot him in her own house. Neither her maid nor any of her friends, including the count, knew of his existence and, therefore, of her motives, which do not come out in the trial. She has been found guilty (she offers no defence) and is sentenced to five years imprisonment. The rest of the book tells of her early life. She has been brought up in wealth and has always enjoyed the bright lights. She was happily married to Richard Eysenach (her second marriage, the first ending very quickly in divorce) and was saddened when he died of a heart attack in her arms in a New York hotel. However, both of them had had affairs. Much of the rest of the book is about how she fears growing old and does what she can to preserve the pretense that she is younger than she really is, an effort that causes her, in the long run, a considerable amount of grief, including the death of Martin. This is a good book, if somewhat sexist by modern standards, but not one of her best.